In this week’s learning we watched the first foreign film to win the academy award for Best Pictures, Parasite 기생충. The film is a black comedy social thriller that illustrated greed and class discrimination in South Korea. The Kim family live in a semi-basement apartment (반 지하), and have to work for low pay temporary jobs such as folding pizza boxes. The son Kim Kiwoo was landed with a tutoring job for an extremely wealthy family, and he pretended to be ‘Kevin’ and forged a university diploma to be hired. The father said “rich people are really gullible,” or “부자들 원래 참 잘 속아” and each of the family members began to recommend each other to work for this family. The Kim family became reliant and dependent on the rich Park family like a parasite.
One of the most interesting aspect of this film is that many films that illustrate class discrimination and wealth gaps usually portrays the rich as the antagonists. However, this film showed how the poor Kim family is scamming the Park family and even ended of causing the death of Mr. Park at the end of the movie. The father Kim Kitaek commented that “they are rich but they are nice,” “부잔데 착하다니까,” and the mom Bak Chungseok said “they are nice because they are rich,” “부자나까 착한거지.”
The article Brenda and I read talked about how the movie parasite sparked a discussion of wealth gap and class discrimination in Korea, and offered an interesting comparison to the United States. The article titled “기생충’이 그린 불평등, 한국보다 미국이 훨씬 심각” which means that the class differences and inequality depicted in the movie Parasite is worse in the United States than South Korea. The article explained that the 최상위, or top 1% owns 25% of the wealth, whereas in the US they own 39%. And it is this class difference that “강하게 울려퍼겼고,” resonated with people strongly, which allowed this movie to be successful.
This particular article contained many connectors such as :
Regardless off 그럼에도 / 불구하고
Therefore 즉
Similarly 잘은 식으로
But/however 그러나
Additionally 아울러
Especially 특히
Even 단
‘ Possession’ – (the ‘s of Korean) - 의
New vocabularies that I took note of :
To compare 통계
Depicted 그린
To analyze 분석
Nightmare 악몽
Strongly resonated 강하게
Different from 달리
To collect 걷고
Pretend 가정
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