5 Little-Known Facts About Parasite, The Movie That Changed Everything

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It's been five years since Bong Joon-ho shook up the film industry with Parasite. Released in 2019, the South Korean feature film took everyone by surprise and we were not displeased. Rotten Tomatoes has named it one of the best films released in the last twenty-five years. Good news: we will see filmmaker Bong Joon-ho at the helm of Mickey 17 with Robert Pattinson on April 16, 2025.

A scathing social satire, Parasite has definitely left its mark. For the fifth anniversary of the film's Oscar victory, Parasite is getting a new IMAX release in several theaters. This is an opportunity to revisit 5 juicy anecdotes about Parasite.

1/Spoiler ban

In Parasite, we follow a poor family who develop a scheme to change their lives when the son gets hired by a rich family. One by one, the family members will pretend to be qualified people, without family ties, to infiltrate the Park home. It's the beginning of a spiral that will become uncontrollable… That's the synopsis of the feature film. It's hard to say more if we don't want to spoil the experience for you if you haven't (yet) seen Parasite.

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Bong Joon-ho is very attached to the mystery surrounding his film. Thus, he wrote a letter to journalists asking them not to reveal anything about the plot after a certain point. Like the trailers that are deliberately intended to be enigmatic. “Revealing nothing beyond this narrative arc will be, for the viewer and the team that made this film possible, a real offering” he explained.

2/A story inspired by true events

When Ki-Woo, the son, gets hired by the Parks, it is as a tutor for the eldest daughter of the wealthy family in order to replace a friend for a set period of time. The young man is then employed to give private English lessons to a teenage girl…

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The director imagined this starting point thanks to his own experience. In his youth, Bong Joon-ho was the tutor of a child from a wealthy family in Seoul. The fake diploma presented to the wealthy family also mentions Yonsei University, where the filmmaker actually studied. We hope that for the rest, everything is indeed invented by the filmmaker.

3/A historic Oscar

Parasiteturned the film industry upside down. Presented in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2019, it won the Palme d’Or unanimously, becoming the first South Korean film to receive this award. It was the beginning of a long series of nominations and awards, to the great delight of Bong Joon-ho.

Without much surprise, Parasite shook up the Oscars in 2020 and left with four statuettes. It notably won the Oscar for Best Picture, the most coveted category. This is the first time that a foreign-language film has won this distinction. Moreover, American viewers have long complained that the feature film be dubbed in English, in vain.

Read also – 10 award-winning films at the Cannes Film Festival that you absolutely must see

4/As good as Walt Disney

We told you, Parasitemarked the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020. In addition to winning the Oscar for Best Picture, a first for a South Korean film and for a foreign-language film at all, Parasite set a record. In fact, the feature film equaled a record previously held by Walt Disney since 1954.

By winning the Oscar in every category in which he was personally nominated, namely Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature Film, and Best Original Screenplay, Bong Joon-ho has done as well as Walt Disney. Hats off!

5/Sets specifically created for the film

If you were captivated by the Park family's house, you should know that it was built specifically for the feature film. The same goes for Ki-taek and his family's apartment. In fact, all the set elements of Parasite were created for the film. The latter also benefited from numerous visual and special effects.

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