Kogonada

Director

Seoul, South Korea

Biography

Park Joong Eun (Korean: 박중은), known professionally as Kogonada, is a South Korean-born American filmmaker. He is known for his video essays that analyze the content, form, and structure of various films and television series. The essays frequently use narration and editing as lenses and highlight a director's aesthetic. Kogonada regularly contributes to Sight & Sound and is often commissioned by The Criterion Collection to create supplemental videos for its home video releases. He has also writt…

Filmography

7.9

Pachinko

This sweeping saga chronicles the hopes and dreams of a Korean immigrant family across four generations as they leave their homeland in an indomitable quest to survive and thrive.

5.4

The Acolyte

A hundred years before the rise of the Empire, the Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic have prospered for centuries without war. During this time, an investigation into a shocking crime spree pits a Jedi Master against a dangerous warrior from his past.

6.2

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

Sarah and David are single strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and soon, through a surprising twist of fate, find themselves on a funny, fantastical, sweeping adventure together where they get to re-live important moments from their respective pasts, illuminating how they got to where they are in the present... and possibly getting a chance to alter their futures.

6.4

After Yang

When his young daughter's beloved companion — an android named Yang — malfunctions, Jake searches for a way to repair him. In the process, Jake discovers the life that has been passing in front of him, reconnecting with his wife and daughter across a distance he didn't know was there.

7.1

Columbus

When a renowned architecture scholar falls suddenly ill during a speaking tour, his son Jin finds himself stranded in Columbus, Indiana - a small Midwestern city celebrated for its many significant modernist buildings. Jin strikes up a friendship with Casey, a young architecture enthusiast who works at the local library.

N/A

Zi

In Hong Kong, a young woman haunted by visions of her future self meets a stranger who changes the course of her night -- and possibly her life.

N/A

The Way of Folk

In this brand new featurette, executive producer T Bone Burnett and the Coen brothers discuss the history of some of the songs that heard in Inside Llywin Davies and possible origin of the stories they tells, the folk movement during the 1960s and the social and cultural ideas that it represented, the authenticity and the identity of folk music and the balance between the two, the future of folk music, etc. Included with the featurette are illustrations by Drew Christie. The featurette was created exclusively for Criterion in 2015.

6.8

Wes Anderson: From Above

A visual essay that highlights top-down shots from Wes Anderson's filmography.

7.1

Linklater: On Cinema and Time

If cinema is the art of time, Linklater is one of its most thoughtful and engaged directors. Unlike other filmmakers identified as auteurs, Linklater’s distinction is not found on the surface of his films, in a visual style or signature shot, but rather in their DNA, as ongoing conversations with cinema, which is to say, with time itself. A visual essay produced by Sight and Sound.

7.4

What Is Neorealism?

Filmmaker Kogonada unpicks what defines the Golden Age of Italian cinema with a side-by-side comparison of two edits of the same film, one according to Italian director Vittorio De Sica, and the other according to Hollywood producer David O. Selznick.

7.1

Malick: Fire & Water

Of all the recurring signatures of Malick, his use of fire and water might be the most telling, in part because there’s a significant shift between early Malick (Badlands & Days of Heaven) and later Malick (The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life & To the Wonder). Early Malick favors fire. Later Malick favors water. In To the Wonder, Malick forgoes fire altogether for the first time in his career. Water reigns.

N/A

Dreams of Cinema

This new video essay by filmmaker Kogonada explores the many layers of director Francois Truffaut's masterpiece "Day for Night."

N/A

Young Arabs

Young Arabs takes viewers inside an elite preparatory school in heart of Cairo, Egypt. The film offers a quiet encounter with a collection of students as they reflect on God, America, terrorism, marriage, the Middle East, and more.

6.0

Tarantino: From Below

Tarantino // From Below Music: Kaifuku Suru Kizu by Salyu

N/A

Elemental

40,000 years in the making: Kogonada's video essay created for The Connected Series.

6.6

Eyes of Hitchcock

When characters stare at the camera in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the look is almost always associated with the threat of death (through the eyes of a victim, a murderer, a witness). This momentary suspension between death and life is partly what makes Hitchcock the indisputable master of suspense.

7.5

Ozu: Passageways

People constantly appear walking through passageways in the films of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu (1903-63). His art resides in the in-between spaces of modern life, in the transitory: alleys are no longer dark and threatening traps where suspense is born, but simple places of passage.

7.0

Stanley Kubrick: One-Point Perspective

Kogonada's visual essay about the formalistice choices of master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick

8.0

Restoring the Apu Trilogy

In 1993, the original negatives of Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy were burned in a massive nitrate fire at a laboratory in London. Even though there were no technologies available at the time capable of fully restoring such badly damaged film elements, the Academy Film Archive held on to them. And now times have changed.

6.6

Auteur in Space

A video essay on how Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris transcends science fiction.