Text written for the HSE 35 mm Film Club as part of the team selection process
Imagine this: your family is barely scraping by, and you live in a basement. You have no money, no stable future, and no hope. What would you do in such a situation just to survive? This question forms the entire plot of one Korean film.
#35mm Recommends
«Parasite» (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
Social inequality is the right to exist for some and the prohibition against it for others. Parasite is a film about the fight for a life that must be earned, and the main characters are willing to do anything for it.
The Kim family, living in a damp semi-basement and surviving on sporadic odd jobs, gradually infiltrates the lives of the wealthy Park family. At first, it appears to be a brilliant scheme: forging documents, flattery, and small deceptions. «If you want to live, you must know how to maneuver”—that is their motto. But the deeper they penetrate the affluent home, the more their fraudulent scheme begins to crack.
In his work, Bong Joon-ho poses complex questions: Is it possible to rise from the bottom without losing yourself? How does one plan a life when fate keeps throwing curveballs? Who is truly the parasite—the poor or the rich? The director offers no answers, only illustrates how these questions exist in reality.
Do you know what plan will never fail? The one that doesn’t exist.