Bong Joon Ho firmly established himself at the vanguard of Korean filmmakers with his five feature films, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006) and Mother (2009), creating a global appetite for his English-language debut Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017). Memories of Murder dealt with a true-life serial murder case (which was solved only in 2019), shattering the conventions of the traditional crime-drama. The Host, in which a bizarre creature leaps out of the Han River and takes over the capital city of Seoul, terrified audiences worldwide upon its release and transformed the creature-feature with its massive scale and creativity. He shifted direction completely by delving into the insanity of the human mind in the psychological thriller Mother, featuring an elderly protagonist who sets out to find a savage killer, which won Best Performance by an Actress and nominated for Best Screenplay at the 2009 APSA ceremony. Snowpiercer incorporates elements of the action-thriller, with its unique setting of a post-apocalyptic super-train racing through icy landscapes in the near future as the last human survivors of a ravaged earth battle to survive under extreme circumstances. He followed this with Okja with its strong environmentalist themes about a young girl and her pet. In 2019, he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Parasite, which was also his second APSA nomination.
The Asia Pacific Screen Academy expresses its respect for and acknowledgement of the South East Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. We pay our respects to the Traditional Owners of country, including the custodial communities on whose land works are created and celebrated by the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. We acknowledge the continuing connection to land, waters and communities. We also pay our respects to Elders, past and present. We recognise the integral role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations peoples continue to play in storytelling and celebration spaces.
