Bong Joon-ho

Bong's maternal grandfather, Park Taewon, was an esteemed author during the Japanese colonial period, best known for his work A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist and his defection to North Korea in 1950.

His older brother, Bong Joon-soo, is an English professor at the Seoul National University; his older sister, Bong Ji-hee, teaches fashion styling at Anyang University.

Currently, Bong's son, Bong Hyo-Min, is also a film director.

While Bong was in elementary school, the family relocated to Seoul, taking up residence in Jamsil-dong by the Han River.

Bong Joon-ho (, ; Hanja: 奉俊昊; born September 14, 1969) is a South Korean film director, producer and screenwriter.

The recipient of three Academy Awards, his filmography is characterised by emphasis on social and class themes, genre-mixing, black humor, and sudden tone shifts.

In 1988, Bong enrolled in Yonsei University, majoring in sociology.

College campuses such as Yonsei's were then hotbeds for the South Korean democracy movement; Bong was an active participant of student demonstrations, frequently subjected to tear gas early in his college years.

In the early 1990s, Bong completed a two-year program at the Korean Academy of Film Arts.

While there, he made many 16 mm short films.

His graduation films, Incoherence and Memories in My Frame, were invited to screen at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and Vancouver International Film Festival.

He served a two-year term in the military in accordance with South Korea's compulsory military service before returning to college in 1992.

Bong later co-founded a film club named "Yellow Door" with students from neighboring universities.

As a member of the club, Bong made his first films, including a stop motion short titled Looking for Paradise and 16 mm film short titled Baeksaekin (White Man).

Aside from cinematography, Bong was also a lighting technician on two shorts—The Love of a Grape Seed and Sounds From Heaven and Earth—in 1994.

Eventually, he suffered severe hardships for more than ten years while working on film production.

In his early stages as a film director, Bong received a meager salary of US$1,900 per year (as 4,500,000 won, or US$3,800, every two years).

It was hard for him to make a living and he barely made enough to buy rice, so he had to borrow rice from his university's alumni.

After graduating, he spent the next five years contributing in various capacities to works by other directors.

He graduated from Yonsei University in 1995.

He received a partial screenplay credit on the anthology film Seven Reasons Why Beer is Better Than a Lover (1996); both screenplay and assistant director credits on Park Ki-yong's debut Motel Cactus (1997); and is one of four writers (along with Jang Joon-hwan) credited for the screenplay of Phantom: The Submarine (1999).

He first became known to audiences and achieved a cult following with his directorial debut film, the black comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), before achieving both critical and commercial success with his subsequent films: the crime thriller Memories of Murder (2003), the monster film The Host (2006), the science fiction action film Snowpiercer (2013), which served as Bong's English language debut, and the near-universally acclaimed black comedy thriller Parasite (2019), all of which are among the highest-grossing films in South Korea, with Parasite also being the highest-grossing South Korean film in history.

Shortly afterwards, Bong began shooting his first feature Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) under producer Cha Seung-jae, who had overseen the production of both Motel Cactus and Phantom: The Submarine.

The film, about a low-ranking university lecturer who abducts a neighbor's dog, was shot in the same apartment complex where Bong lived after his marriage.

At the time of its release in February 2000, it received little commercial interest but some positive critical reviews.

It was invited to the competition section of Spain's San Sebastián International Film Festival, and won awards at the Slamdance Film Festival and Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Slowly building international word of mouth also helped the film financially; over two years after its local release, the film reached its financial break-even point due to sales to overseas territories.

Bong also collaborated on several works with his classmates, which included working as cinematographer on the highly acclaimed short 2001 Imagine (1994), directed by his friend Jang Joon-hwan.

Bong's second film, Memories of Murder (2003), a much larger project, was adapted from a stage play centered on a real-life serial killer who terrorized a rural town in the 1980s and was never caught (although a suspect confessed to the crime in 2019).

Production of the film was a difficult process (the film set a local record for the number of locations it used).

It was released in April 2003 and proved a critical and popular success.

Word of mouth drove the film to sell over five million tickets (rescuing Cha Seung-jae's production company Sidus from near-bankruptcy), and a string of local honors followed, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (for Song Kang-Ho) and Best Lighting prizes at the Grand Bell Awards in 2003.

His father retired from Seoul Institute of Technology as a professor of design in 2007 and died in 2017.

All of Bong's films have been South Korean productions, although both Snowpiercer and Okja (2017) are mostly in the English language.

Two of his films have screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival—Okja in 2017 and Parasite in 2019; the latter earned the Palme d'Or, which was a first for a South Korean film.

Parasite also became the first South Korean film to receive Academy Award nominations, with Bong winning Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, making Parasite the first film in the award's history not in English to win Best Picture.

In 2017, Bong was included on Metacritic's list of the 25 best film directors of the 21st century.

In 2020, Bong was included in Time's annual list of 100 Most Influential People and Bloomberg 50.

Bong Joon Ho was born in Bongheok-dong, Nam-gu, Daegu, South Korea and is the youngest of four children.

His father, Bong Sang-gyun, was a first-generation graphic designer, industrial designer, and professor of art at Yeungnam University and the head of the art department at the National Film Institute; his mother, Park So-young, was a full-time housewife.