Do we like Bong Joon-ho?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean harm record and a track record of speaking up for others, marked down only because the record on LGBTQ+ issues is silent.
Bong is the Korean director who made Parasite, which won four Oscars and made him a household name well outside arthouse circles. Before that he made big-swinging genre films like Snowpiercer and Okja, with a sharp eye on class and inequality. That theme runs through nearly everything he does.
The most telling chapter is political. Korea expert S. Nathan Park wrote in the Washington Post that Bong was reportedly on a government blacklist of about 9,000 artists, drawn up under the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye governments to starve left-leaning creatives of funding. He kept making films anyway. It is reported, not proven in court, but it fits a man who has never hidden where he stands.
Harm check: we found nothing nasty from him about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. In 2021 he told filmmakers to confront anti-Asian hate crimes and not shy away from the issue. In December 2024 he signed a film-industry statement demanding President Yoon Suk Yeol's suspension, impeachment and arrest after the martial law declaration. To be straight with you, we found no direct statement from him on trans rights either way, so the pass rests on a clean record and not on a loud one.
The company he keeps looks fine too. His latest, Ally, is financed by CJ ENM, Penture Invest and Pathé, co-written with Jason Yu, and produced with long-time collaborator Seo Woo-sik. Nothing in that lineup sets off alarms.
The one legal scrape was in Korea. As head of the film directors' guild, he joined other groups in 2016 in accusing the film council's leadership of misusing funds. A dismissed official later sued him and others for false accusation and defamation. Prosecutors declined to indict, saying there was no basis to find the claims false, and a separate damages suit was still ongoing at the last report we could open. Separately, an Indian producer publicly alleged in 2020 that Parasite copied a 1999 film. No lawsuit was confirmed in what we read.
The good stuff is about standing up for others. In January 2024 he fronted a press conference of artists calling for an investigation into how police and media treated the late actor Lee Sun-kyun. The group said the actor suffered severe character assassination before his death and called for better legal protection for people under criminal investigation. That is the kind of thing you do for a colleague when it is not good for your own career.