Now best known globally as the Oscar-winning director of Parasite and one of the greats of Korean cinema, director Bong Joon-ho began his film-making journey when he was a university student in the early 1990s. Netflix has confirmed the production of a documentary, Yellow Door: Looking for Director Bong Joon-ho’s Unreleased Short Film (working title).
This documentary will trace the quest for Bong’s unreleased first short film, Looking For Paradise, made during his university days. Besides shedding light on the creative origins of a great artist, the documentary will also illuminate an era when young cinephiles emerged in South Korea.
While many believe Bong’s first film to be the 1994 short White Man, his real first film is Looking for Paradise, a short filmed with stop-motion techniques_._ This 22-minute film was screened for some 10 members of the cinephile club Yellow Door on Christmas, 1992, and has never been seen since. In the process of getting to the bottom of Bong’s mysterious film-making debut, Yellow Door (working title) pieces together the memories of the only witnesses to the film and recreates an era of avid movie lovers.
The documentary features meetings with the viewers of Looking for Paradise, who look back on the activities of Yellow Door. These film club members also reminisce about the young Bong, who obsessively took care of Yellow Door’s greatest asset — its video library. These fragmented recollections recreate an era of cinephiles and the start of Bong’s adventures as a filmmaker.
Will Looking for Paradise ever resurface? Director Lee Hyuk-rae will take viewers back 30 years in the search for an answer to this question. Look out for Yellow Door (working title) in 2023, only on Netflix.
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