by Federico Grandesso
CANNES, France, May 30 (Xinhua) -- "I have this fear of not receiving proper protection from the country and our society, so when this happens I think that the only thing you can rely on is your family," said South Korean film director Bong Joon-ho, the new Palme D'Or winner.
"My films are family films. In my real life I have lots of anxieties regarding society and the system," Bong told Xinhua recently. "You become more obsessed with your family because of the incompetence of the system you are in, so my films are always about people who don't really fit in the system and who don't feel happy in the environment that the nation provides."
"Parasite," the 132-minute film that garnered the top prize at the just-concluded Cannes Film Festival, concerns two families living in the same city but otherwise worlds apart.
The film starts with the son of the poor family getting a chance to work as a tutor in the better-off one. Slowly, the poor attempt to "invade" the comfortable villa and improve their own lives.
When asked about the job market in South Korea, the director said his movie characters seem to possess good skills but fail to get any employment. Viewers could learn from the film that a security guard position would attract 500 graduates as applicants, a phenomenon featured on South Korean media.
Not one who gets angry when facing extreme situations and poverty, the son just accepts everything, Bong said. "If you look at the film from his perspective, you really feel that sense of sadness."
Despite all efforts made, "why isn't this gap (between rich and poor) decreasing? I have fear coming from this question," the South Korean director said. "What is more frightening is the fact that this is not going to be solved in the future of my children's generation."
When a young protagonist in "Parasite" tells himself that he will buy a big house, his ambitions, however, will likely elicit doubt from the viewers. He calculates how many years it would take to buy the house, if he saved money without spending it and with the average income he is likely to receive. The answer: 547 years.
"His determination doesn't come from his desire to become rich but from the desire to see his father again, because his father is punishing himself for the crime he has committed, so he is basically locked himself up in the 'prison house,' so the son just wants to pull him out of there and that's why the son wants to buy the house," the director said.
Born in 1969, Bong has produced such acclaimed pictures as "Memories of Murder." "Parasite" is his seventh film. In 2017, he was a strong contestant in the Cannes Film Festival with the film "Okja."
"As a film-maker or an artist, we have no choice but to reflect about the times we live in, so we are inspired by what's happening in the world," he said.
Bong also reflected on genre. "Sometimes I follow the conventions and sometimes I break them, but I don't think I ever stray far outside that genre boundaries, I feel more comfortable and relieved when I'm inside the genre boundaries."
Though depicting violence here and there in films, "I don't like to use too much blood in my movies, if you look at (Alfred) Hitchcock's films they don't show too much blood, and I really respect that style," he said. "What is really important with violence is its timing, when it explodes, the audience has to be taken by surprise."
His distributor once sent him a review by a journalist who wrote that Bong himself is the genre. "That's the comment that I like the most," he said.
