Cannes Winner Bong Joon-ho to Receive Retrospective at Munich Film Fest

The 'Parasite' director will be honored with screenings of his previous works, including 'The Host,' 'Mother' and 'Snowpiercer.'

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, fresh from his Palme d'Or-winning success in Cannes with Parasite, will be honored at next month's Munich Film Festival with a career retrospective.

The Munich festival announced Monday that a series of Bong's works would be screened this year, from the 2003 crime drama Memories of Murder and 2006 international breakthrough The Host to English-language features Snowpiercer and Okja.

The Munich retrospective will look at the breath of Bong's career, which has ranged from the noir drama Memories of Murder, to the monster movie action of The Host to the mystery drama of 2009's Cannes entry Mother and the comedy fantasy of Tokyo! (2008), a cinematic triptych which saw Bong contribute a segment alongside French directors Leos Carax (Holy Motors) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

Parasite, which marks Bong's first Korean feature in a decade, and which became the first-ever Korean film to win Cannes' Palme d'Or for best film, will screen in competition in Munich this year.

Munich will also honor Danish documentary filmmaker Mads Brugger with a retrospective. The director and satiric journalist first attracted attention with his 2009 doc The Red Chapel, which won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema – Documentary section in Sundance. In the film, Brugger and two Danish comedians pretend to be a vaudeville act in order to get access to enter and travel through North Korea.

Most recently, in Cold Case Hammarskjold, Brugger took on one of the great unsolved murders in recent European history: the killing, in 1961, of UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjold. The film, which premiered in Sundance this year, is the result of six years of research into the crime and the conspiracy theories it inspired.

Some of Brugger's other documentaries include 2011's The Ambassador, in which the director goes undercover as a Liberian ambassador to uncover the blood diamond trade in Africa; and 2018's The Saint Bernard Syndicate, a look at two Danish entrepreneurs who launch a company to sell Saint Bernard dogs to China's growing middle class.

The 37th Munich International Film Festival runs June 27 to July 6.

