Parasite proves South Korea has been at the forefront of cinema for years – British GQ

Unless youve been living under a rock or maybe you just really hate subtitles youve probably heard how good Parasite is. The inevitable champion of the Oscars' International Feature category, and also the winner of Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture, it also marks the first time a South Korean movie has made the final five for the International category at all.

You might be inclined to think that this suggests South Korea has only just got its shit together when it comes to cinema. To you I say: you couldnt be more wrong, and also how dare you? South Korea has been producing exceptional cinema for a century, and Parasite is less of a sudden spike in quality than a sign of how blind we in the West have been to how good the country is.

"Compared to Japanese or Hong Kong film, the history of Korean cinema is relatively lesser known to American and European audiences, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho told NPR. I hope, due to the opportunities that have arisen fromParasite,people will realise that Korean cinema has also had a lot of masters."

We spoke to the experts about the rise and rise of Korean film, how dark comedies about class came to define a nations cinematic output, and what films to watch next if you walked out of Parasite with a craving for something with a little more Seoul.

The first big Korean film was a kinodrama, explains Hyun Jin Cho, the film curator at the Korean Cultural Centre UK and director of the London Korean Film Festival. It was half film, half theatre, and it was called The Righteous Revenge. That was made by Korean nationals during the period of Japanese occupation.

In the 1960s, a brief phase of prosperity produced what is seen as Koreas first Golden Age of cinema. There was always political turmoil in Korea in the last half a century, explained Jin, and the 1960s saw a brief period between two dictatorships. There was a brief moment of release from the censorship of the government in 1960 and 1961," Jin said. "That breathing room pushed a lot of film artists to create something very original. Jin compares it to Italian neorealism: a similar phase of a society dusting itself off after a very difficult period. Other people I spoke to compared it to Polish cinema after Communism. Because society is in, you know, a shithole, it gives artists inspiration to make something challenging, said Jin.

A few films stand out from this era, including one that Bong Joon-ho has spoken about many times as a spiritual ancestor to Parasite: The Housemaid. Released in 1960 and available for free on YouTube it has, like Parasite, been described as a domestic Gothic. In The Housemaid, a piano teacher asks his new student for help finding someone to assist his exhausted wife with the housework: the new arrival, beautiful and odd, terrorises the family and exposes their deepest flaws. The Housemaid is an almost operatic melodrama, based on a story in the papers, that explodes Korea's burgeoning middle class.

This is less than ten years after the Korean War was finished. The countrys completely destroyed. People were trying to rebuild the country but a lot of emphasis was put on the main cities," explained Jin. People from the countryside were moving to Seoul in an attempt to be part of the boom taking place in the big cities, often ending up as servants to middle-class families. This is the first time that Korea has a middle class, she explained. Bong Joon-ho has previously pointed out that the stairs in the family house play such a vital role in the film, in part because few families at the time would have had a second floor.

Following that brief moment of artistic freedom in the 1960s, explained Hyun Jin Cho, South Korea fell under an extremely oppressive regime. Dr Agata Lulkowska a lecturer in film production at Staffordshire University says that the first Golden Age continued after the rise of Park Chung-hee's military government in 1961, despite his authoritarian regime: "Korean cinema transformed into a dynamic industry inspired by Hollywood practices," explained Dr Lulkowska. The big films of the period, she says, "all struggle with the strong government policies on the one hand, and creating the new expectations and standards for the formation of the Korean film industry."

In the 1970s and 1980s, she explained, "they would censor scripts, and a creative voice was very difficult to have. The 1970s, in particular, are known as Korea's cinematic 'Dark Age'. This began to change in 1997, when the Korean Constitutional Court eliminated film censorship and the Busan Film Festival was established. Then, also in 1997, Kim Dae-jung's election marked the first time the ruling party peacefully handed over power to the democratically elected opposition. It led to more tolerance of creative voices, and though Kim's election took place during the start of the Asian financial crisis, Jin says it led to some champagne years for the South Korean economy.

The end of the former regime also meant there was a rise in the number of foreign pictures available to Korean filmgoers, and this had a big effect on filmmakers: Bong Joon-ho has previously mentioned how Claude Chabrol, Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Loseys The Servant were all influences on Parasite. Foreign pictures came to South Korea through the French and German Institutes in Seoul. Before then, film aficionados usually relied on their friends going abroad and sending back DVDs and materials. While Korean cinema itself has been just as much of an influence on the latest wave of directors Bong Joon-ho considers Kim Ki-young, the director of The Housemaid, as his mentor this boom in foreign arthouse movies also marked the end of most of Korea's biggest directors of today leaving university. While they were in university, for the first time there was a kind of strong cinephile culture, Hyun Jin Cho explained. Bong Joon-ho made his first feature film in 2000, with Lee Chang-dong and Park Chan-wook making theirs in the late 1990s.

Following the financial crisis, South Korea introduced the the Framework Act on the Promotion of Cultural Industries in 1999. This sought to enhance the competitiveness of Korean culture for the development of the national economy. You can see this in the rise of Korean culture at the turn of the century: K-Pop, Seouls menswear scene, K-Beauty and Korean food have exploded in their own ways across the rest of Asia and, now, the West.

Korean Cinema in the 1990s became the playground of what is now known as the Korean New Wave. Central to this are three directors: Kim Jee-woon (I Saw The Devil), Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) and Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host.) In 1999, the film Shiri was released: "the first example of a Korean film which is comparable to a Hollywood-style blockbuster," explained Dr Lulkowska. She says it was more successful than Titanic in its home country. The biggest success of this era might be Parks Oldboy, which won the Cannes Grand Prix in 2004, and was later remade by Spike Lee. Quentin Tarantino was also a huge fan. Oldboy, exceedingly violent and remembered in part for someone eating a live octopus and in part for a crazy fight scene filmed in one take, became perhaps the defining work of Korean cinema to Western eyes.

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The films that broke out of Korea in the early 2000s, Jin said, all fit into a genre known as Extreme Cinema, of which Asian films have become an integral part. Horror and violent films were the ones getting exported out of Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, predominantly by Palisades Tartan and its label Asian Extreme. Tartan filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and the end of the Asian Extreme era seems to have marked a lull in international appetite for Korean film.

How Korea itself viewed its cinematic output also changed. From the 1990s onwards, Korean consumption of domestic cinema was always above 50%, with a peak of 61.2% in 2006. "This is an extraordinary cultural achievement," explained Dr Lulkowska, "almost unheard of beyond the US and perhaps India and France." In 2006, after years of quotas that meant homegrown cinematic talent got a larger share of days to screen in cinemas over international cinema, the countrys plans for a free trade agreement with the US meant they halved the quota. By 2007, the Korea Times reported, homegrown movies were providing the smallest share of movie revenue in South Korea in years, made all the sadder by the fact Oldboy had provided a huge boom domestically for South Korean cinema.

Luckily this hasnt lasted. Its arguable but not by any means set in stone that the late 2010s have provided another wave of excellent Korean cinema. There was The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wooks exceptional lesbian drama adapted from Sarah Waters period novel, and the first Korean movie to be nominated for and win! a Bafta. Then there was Burning, a Korean adaptation of Haruki Murakamis Barn Burning, directed by Lee Chang-dong. Burning was the first Korean movie to ever make the shortlist for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Big-name Korean directors have also begun to hold their own making big budget western projects: Park directed the BBC drama Little Drummer Girl, as well as Stoker. Bong Joon-ho recently directed Okja for Netflix and the incredible sci-fi movie Snowpiercer starring Chris Evans and Song Kang-ho.

Hyun Jin Cho argues that its hard to lump all of Korean cinema into any singular trend or theme. But, she says, the idea of financial inequality in modern society has been a defining feature of both the 1960s Golden Age and modern Korean cinema. In 1960s classics like The Housemaid, The Coachman or Obaltan one of South Korea's most acclaimed cinematic masterpieces a modernising, post-conflict South Korea is riddled with rapid socio-economic acceleration and deep trauma.

Dark humour and violence have often been central to breakout movies, says Dr Lulkowska, alongside "highly developed aesthetics, genre construction and hybridisation, and local investment support": Shiri, the aforementioned 1990s blockbuster, was funded by Samsung Entertainment. Bong Joon-hos work shows many of these qualities over and over again: comedy and horror coalesce time and time again, while ideas of who has and who doesnt are consistently at the fore.

South Korean cinema with its dark heart, biting humour and political conscience makes for excellent viewing. Plus, its interest and engagement with Western cinema means it has a peculiar way of combining the familiar with the very particularly and specifically Korean, "which makes it very different from Asian cinemas," said Dr Lulkowska. "It seems to be a natural process rather than a cold calculation." As varied and exciting as Italian or French cinema, Parasite is a perfect place to start your journey: 100 years on from Korea's first film, South Korea deserves the sort of respect we've long afforded other, whiter, filmmaking nations.

As aforementioned, The Housemaid is one of the most deified pieces of cinema to come out of Korea's first Golden Age, and a major inspiration for Parasite. It's also available on YouTube to watch whenever you want. Big, melodramatic, dark and surreal, it's a fascinating look at class mobility, money and inequality.

Korean cinema is no stranger to unremitting bleakness, but Obaltan is almost sadistic. A gruelling analysis of life after the Korean War, it follows Cheolho (Kim Jin-kyu) and his family who all, in their own ways, are damaged by the conflict they have survived. A film riddled with the signs of a people in the grips of trauma, it is considered "one of the best South Korean movies ever made," explained Hyun Jin Cho, who recommends it. It deals with the situation of the poor and how society divides people, especially after the war. Its quite different from Parasite but it has a really amazing realist vision of that time.

Another of the best films to come out of the 1960s Golden Age, Kang Dae-jin's 1961 drama follows a horse-cart driver who finds companionship with his neighbour's maid. It became the first South Korean film to win an international film festival award: clinching the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the 1961 Berlinale.

Lim Soon-rye is an exceptional director, and also one of Korea's most prominent female filmmakers. Her 1996 movie Three Friends, which Hyun Jin Cho recommends, is a study of Korean economic disparity after the financial boom of the 1990s, and those who it left behind. "She beautifully describes and portrays these three young men going through their early 20s in this period in Seoul," said Jin.

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Bong Joon-ho's directorial debut from 2000 shows all the signs of what went on to define him as one of South Korea's most acerbic and insightful filmmakers. "It talks about a middle-class, well-educated man who doesnt know how to deal with life," explained Hyun Jin Cho. "Again, I think you can see Bongs amazing sense of humanity and humour and sensitivity to things.

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A darkly humorous monster film, you say? Were intrigued. Hot on the heels of Bong Joon-hos acclaimed Memories of Murder, The Host was at the time the highest-grossing South Korean movie of all time. Slow-witted snack-bar owner Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) tries to save his daughter from a rampaging creature that emerges from the Han River only to discover he grabbed the wrong girl. When his daughter is kidnapped by the beast, Park goes on the hunt to rescue his child.

Directed by Lee Chang-dong, and starring two of the leads from Parasite, 2007s Secret Sunshine is a film about grief with a shocking twist, as a widow is forced to face a series of unrelenting tragedies. It's a perfect example of Koreas fascination with movies about the frailties of the modern condition: Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-edacalled it the movie of the 21st century, and lead Jeon Do-yeon won the award for Best Actress at Cannes 2007. For those who watch it and fall in love with Jeon, she also appears in a 2010 remake of The Housemaid.

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A Girl At My Door is a stand-out movie for many reasons: its directed by a woman, July Jung, and stars as several others films on this list do the exceptional actress Bae Doona. It also portrays a lesbian relationship, which left the film to be made on a shoestring budget (both of its stars did it for free.) Bae plays a troubled police officer, moved from Seoul to a sleepy and drunken seaside town. Here, Baes character meets an abused teenaged girl, which opens up difficult questions about all involved. Receiving a three-minute standing ovation at Cannes, its a great watch.

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Moving art from one culture to another is a tricky business: just look at how terrible it was when America tried to do The Inbetweeners. But sometimes, transplanting the ideologies of one society and time into another is a perfect fit: look at how brilliant it was when America did Shameless.

The Handmaiden transplants Sarah Waters iconic lesbian Victoriana to Korea under Japanese occupation in the early 20th century. Everything about it works perfectly, and what comes next is a near-three-hour movie that leaves you begging for more. Filled with twists, narrative finesse, black humour and a healthy amount of erotica, The Handmaiden is a dark but luscious thrill ride from start to finish.

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Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-hos socially conscious, violent and hilarious movie about a train at the end of the world, is one of my favourite movies ever made. But South Korea also produced another exceptional movie about an apocalyptic train: Yeon Sang-ho's Train To Busan tells the story of divorced father Seok-woo boarding a train with his young daughter while a zombie outbreak rocks the world. When it's discovered that a woman on the train has a bite wound, the people onboard fight against each other as much as they fight the plague. Its bold, its brash, its brilliant.

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The first Korean movie to be shortlisted for the Foreign Film Oscar, Burning adapts Haruki Murakamis short story about a man (Steven Yeun) who feels morally obliged to burn down barns (or greenhouses in the film). Burning was picked by The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as one of their top ten films of 2018, and chosen by other critics as one of their films of the 2010s.

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Parasite proves South Korea has been at the forefront of cinema for years - British GQ

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero