Parasite director Bong Joon-Ho to present black and white version of his film at Rotterdam

Bong Joon-Ho, the director of the acclaimed South Korean film,  _Parasite_ , will soon present a black-and-white version of the film at International Film Festival Rotterdam. The Film Stage mentions that there are no more details on the filmmaker’s desire to present the feature in this format but he had previously expressed the wish to make a black-and-white film. [caption id=“attachment_6735311” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] A still from Parasite.[/caption] He has experimented with the medium in 2013, when he premiered a black-and-white reimagining of 2009’s Mother at the Mar Del Plata International Film Festival in Argentina. At a panel he had said he said that after watching  F W Murnau’s 1922 silent horror film, Nosferatu, he was inspired to shoot in a similar way. “It was a very purified experience,” which made him want to go back to “a very pure state of film, like a salmon swimming upstream.” IndieWire notes that Bong is not the first director to do the same. George Miller and James Margold did the same with Mad Max: Fury Road and Logan (released as Logan Noir), respectively. Bong’s black comedy is in the running for the Best International Feature Oscar and had earned the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival 2019. Billed as a “pitch-black modern fairytale,” Parasite follows two very different families who find themselves tangled up in a complex bond that is threatened by encroaching outside forces. The film now marks the fourth collaboration between Bong and actor Song Kang-ho, who plays the patriarch of the penniless Kim family. Jang Hye-jin, Choi Woo-shik, and Park So-dam star as his wife, son, and daughter, with Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, and Lee Jung-eun rounding the cast. In a recent interview with Variety, Bong had revealed that he had not had enough time to ruminate over why Parasite received such an overwhelming response , “I need more time to really understand. To be honest, my job ended in late March when I completed the film. Everything that happened from Cannes to now, I didn’t anticipate, predict or plan. The story is very universal. It’s a story about rich and poor. But maybe there is something more.”