From the houses to the noodles, South Korea’s Oscar winning movie “Parasite” tells its story of a suffocating class struggle through the sights and smells of Seoul.
“Parasite” made history as the first non-English language movie to win the Oscar for best picture on Sunday, prompting South Korean social media to erupt in celebration.
It is a tale of two South Korean families – the wealthy Parks and the poor Kims – mirroring the deepening disparities in Asia’s fourth-largest economy and striking a chord with global audiences.
The visual clues in the film resonated with many South Koreans who identify themselves as “dirt spoons”, those born to low-income families who have all but given up on owning a decent house and social mobility, as opposed to “gold spoons”, who are from better-off families.
Much of the movie was shot on purpose-built sets, but both the Parks’ mansion and the Kims’ squalid “sub-basement” apartment were inspired by, and set, amid real neighborhoods in the South Korean capital.
