When Parasite first opened in North America at the end of October 2019-despite the Palme d’Or, only three screens showed the film due to a lack of interest in subtitled films. Grossing over $267 million worldwide on a modest production budget of $11 million, it is not only a critical accomplishment but also a commercial success. The film, funded by Seoul-based Barunson Entertainment & Arts Corporation, edged out Hollywood competitors made for nine times as much (Kim and Lee 2020, 2020).
It also won Oscars for Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Original Screenplay. Seven months after Cannes, Parasite also made history in the 92 years of the Academy Awards for being the first film not in the English language to win Best Picture. The film also chalked up successes at the Golden Globe Awards (Best Motion Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay), the BAFTA (Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film, and Best Direction), and the Screen Actors Guild Awards (Best Cast in a Motion Picture). Parasite first premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival on to become the first South Korean film to win the Palme d’Or. In that scene, the neighbors have turned off theirs, prompting a panic among the Kims who cannot function without connecting to the Internet for social networking and for ordering pizza for lunch-universal references that are likely to be far from foreign to many audiences around the world. Ki-woo and his struggling family-who fold pizza boxes for a living-leech off their neighbors’ Wi-Fi connections. In a dingy Seoul semi-basement apartment, a young man named Kim Ki-woo crouches near a window searching for an elusive Wi-Fi signal. In the opening scene, Wi-Fi serves as a metaphor for division as well as coexistence. As a “foreign” film to audiences outside South Korea, Parasite resonated with foreign viewers due to “its ability to convey the same message to international audiences without relying on cultural references to make it relevant and understandable” (Vandenburg 2019). The film, with Korean as its primary language, was set in South Korea, filmed in Seoul alleyways and a studio set in the city of Goyang, and was produced by an almost exclusively Korean cast and crew who gave international media interviews and Oscar acceptance speeches in Korean using interpreters. The film’s success reflects not only a significant global expansion of the country’s nascent cultural industries but also a strategic nation branding opportunity for enhancing South Korea’s soft power and cultural diplomacy.ĭirector Bong Joon-ho’s social satire about the uneasy, symbiotic (or parasitic) relationship between a poor family, the Kims and the wealthy Parks, is universally relatable. On February 10, 2020, Parasite (2019) from South Korea became the first non-English speaking film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, marking a major cultural industry breakthrough for the East Asian country.
Sentiment analyses through Leximancer also show positive attitudes, thus helping to reinforce the nation branding of Parasite and its successes as a tangible South Korean national resource, consistent with a soft power approach. The texts associate Parasite with the national entity of South Korea and the country’s most significant cultural content export, the Korean Wave. To explicate South Korea’s nation brand vis-à-vis Parasite, a Leximancer analysis of 8808 texts investigated concepts that are associated with the film as a complex bundle of images, meanings, associations, and experiences in the minds of international audiences. Despite growing depoliticalization and decentralization, South Korea’s cultural diplomacy policy remains unilateral in embracing Parasite’s success for nation branding while drawing on expanding private-sector resources to produce and market the film. This study examines the nation branding of South Korea through the Oscar-winning film Parasite (2019) to understand the South Korean government’s approach toward cultural diplomacy, and its outcomes.