A Nation’s Cry: Han in Oldboy and Parasite

Both Oldboy (Park Chan-wook 2003) and Parasite (Bong Joon-ho) testify to the obscurity of contemporary cinematic sociocultural boundaries, with globalization facilitating not only physical transnational distribution but also receptivity to other cultures. Reducing the value of Korean cinema solely to its positive global reception, however, amplifies the external whilst trivializing the internal: rather than investigating why these films made it beyond South Korea, we should be asking why these films were made in South Korea.