Korean Film’s Success Changing Hollywood Stereotype
February 17, 2020
South Korean film Parasite won 4 awards at the 2020 Oscars on February 9, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Original Screenplay. This is the 1st time a foreign language film has won the coveted Best Picture title.
Senior Arine Kim was excited about Parasite’s Oscar success. “I’m Korean, it’s a Korean film,” she said. “It’s a good [gateway] not [just for] Asian films but foreign films to do well and I think it’s great that it’s getting properly recognized as, like, the masterpiece that it is.”
Kim acknowledged the struggles 1 faces as a person of color. “I think just being a person of color…you still face and you still experience discrimination on a basis and racial slurs and whatnot,” she said.
“I think representation in the media is important, mainly because my favorite Disney princess growing up was Mulan, and that’s who I looked up to because that was the person that kinda looked like me. And I think it’s important for other people to have role models and figures to look up to, especially in the media, because that’s what you’re exposed to on a daily basis,” said Kim.
Junior Noel Seo said, “Films like Parasite [are nice] because it’s cool to see people who look like you doing the stuff that white people have been doing for a long time.”
According to researchers at the University of Southern California, 73.% of film actors are white, while only 5.3% of actors are Asian.
“It’s a motivator too, for people who want to pursue careers in [film], because it shows them that they can succeed in the same areas in an industry that is predominantly white,” Seo added.
Seo noted the rise of representation in the media, with the popularity of recent movies like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Crazy Rich Asians. “Now we have this major film that is getting probably the most attention out of all of them. I think it’s a really great step for inclusion and decreasing whitewashing, because that’s happened in the past a lot,” she said.
Freshman Clara Cho added, “I think it shows that in the future there will be more movies and films that will be recognized towards Asians. Before that wasn’t really common but now [Parasite] shows that it can happen.”
