The real-life sights of South Korea’s Oscar-winning ‘Parasite’
SEOUL: The woman who stepped up to make the final acceptance speech when Bong Joon-ho’s satire Parasite — about the gap between rich and poor — won the Oscar for Best Picture is herself a member of South Korea’s wealthiest family.
Miky Lee, an heiress turned media mogul, is the executive producer of the first non-englishlanguage film to secure the Academy Awards’ top prize in their 92-year history.
The film has been praised at home and abroad for its critique of inequality, but Lee is the granddaughter of Lee Byung-chul, the founder of the giant Samsung group — by far the largest of the family-controlled, often-controversial conglomerates known as chaebol that dominate business in the world’s 12th-largest economy.
She is the vice chairwoman of the CJ Group, a food and entertainment giant that was spun out of Samsung in the 1990s as the empire was divided between different arms of the family.
Chaebol families are often intimately connected with South Korea’s political class, and her cousin is Lee Jae-yong, the Samsung Electronics vice-chairman currently on trial for bribing former president Park Geun-hye in a corruption scandal that saw her ousted from power.
But Miky Lee herself was secretly blacklisted by Park’s conservative government after she invested in a film based on the life of left-leaning president Roh Moo-hyun.
A diminutive Harvard graduate, she is known as a cinematic connoisseur, with previous collaborations with Bong including “Memories of Murder” (2003), “Mother” (2009), and the Tilda Swinton-starring “Snowpiercer” (2013).
Among those she praised in her Oscars speech were Korean filmgoers, who she said “never hesitated to give us straightforward opinion”, driving directors and creators to “keep pushing the envelopes”.
The unprecedented Oscars haul for “Parasite” is the culmination of a corporate push into Hollywood that Lee has spearheaded for years.
In 1995 she invested $300 million in the Dreamworks studio as it was set up by Hollywood heavyweights including Steven Spielberg.
She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the powerful organisation that awards the Oscars, and has connections throughout showbusiness in the US, where she moved after her blacklisting.
Lee supervises CJ ENM, one of the South’s biggest media groups, which has operations in television, K-pop, film studios and multiplexes, subsidiaries in at least six countries, and a market capitalisation of 3.7 trillion won ($3 billion).
South Korean reports say the firm spent $8.5 million on an Oscar campaign for “Parasite” — including screenings, adverts and publicity events to appeal to voters -- although the company declined to confirm the figure.
In the event it took home four Oscars, including best director, best screenplay and best international feature film, but So-rim Lee of the University of Pennsylvania pointed out that none of the acceptance speeches, including Bong’s, raised “the actual social issues they purport to address through the film”.
“She’s a true cinephile who’s watched so many films and managed to bring over that fanatic passion to the world of business,” the Hollywood Reporter quoted him as saying.
But the South’s chaebols have often been accused of being root causes — via unethical practices such as exploitation of monopoly power and union suppression — of the widening inequality his film portrays.
The contribution Lee, 61, and CJ have made to Korean cinema “cannot be understated”, scholar Bae wrote in a tweet.
It also “underlines the fact that the frequently leftist, populist, anti-wealth messages in Korean cinema are conveyed through the vehicle of chaebol funding”.
From the houses to the noodles, South Korea’s Oscar winning movie “Parasite” tells its story of a suffocating class struggle through the sights and smells of Seoul.
“Parasite” made history as the first nonEnglish language movie to win the Oscar for best picture on Feb.9, prompting South Korean social media to erupt in celebration.
It is a tale of two South Korean families — the wealthy Parks and the poor Kims — mirroring the deepening disparities in Asia’s fourth-largest economy and striking a chord with global audiences.
The visual clues in the film resonated with many South Koreans who identify themselves as “dirt spoons”, those born to low-income families who have all but given up on owning a decent house and social mobility, as opposed to “gold spoons”, who are from better-off families.
Much of the movie was shot on purposebuilt sets, but both the Parks’ mansion and the Kims’ squalid “sub-basement” apartment were inspired by, and set, amid real neighbourhoods in the South Korean capital.
A tour of the film’s locations, props, and backdrops reveals the unique meanings they have for many South Koreans as they engage in their own debates about wealth — and the lack of it.
Ahyeon-dong is one of the last shanty towns near downtown Seoul and made an appearance in several scenes depicting the Kims’ humble neighbourhood.
Perched on a hillside near the main train station, Ahyeon-dong is a warren of steep, narrow streets, many of which end in long staircases that residents climb to reach their homes.
“Watching the film made me feel like they put my life right in there,” said Lee Jeong-sik, the 77-year-old co-owner of Rice Supermarket, which is featured in the film.
Kim Kyung-soon, 73, who has operated the shop with her husband Lee for 45 years, said she opens the supermarket at around 8:30 am, while he closes it down after midnight.
She used to open the store even earlier, at 5 am, for mothers who would stop by early to buy school lunch fixings for their children. Now, however, the neighbourhood is mostly older people, with few young couples or children, Kim said.
The film’s fictional Kim family live in a “subbasement”, usually small, dark apartments built partially underground.
Residents said rent for the sub-basement apartments had increased to around 400,000 won ($340) per month, more than doubling in the past decade.
Ahyeon-dong sits in the shadow of newly built apartment towers, and the city has faced protests from some residents who fear losing their homes to redevelopment.
“It’s definitely a neighbourhood that isn’t faring well,” Lee said. When he heard that “Parasite” had won at the Academy Awards he was so happy he could not sleep. As a throng of media gathered outside his shop, he wondered whether the film’s fame would change plans to eventually build new apartments there.
In contrast, the scenes around the wealthy Parks’ home — which itself was a movie set built elsewhere — were filmed in Seongbuk-dong, known as South Korea’s Beverly Hills and home to many business families and diplomatic residences.
Unlike Ahyeon-dong, the streets in Seongbukdong are clear of rubbish and almost silent, with most homes hidden behind high walls, spiked fences, and security cameras.
As news of the Oscar wins spread, South Korean social media burst with photos and recipes of “jjapaguri”, a combination of two different instant noodles translated in the movie as “ram-dong” (ramen plus udong).
The dish initially became popular as everyday food due to a television show but got a boost from the film, which added a satirical twist as the Parks top it with expensive Korean beef.