Bong Joon Ho's Okja was booed at Cannes, then won a four-minute ovation
The Cannes crowd jeered twice in the opening minutes of Okja's 2017 premiere: once at the Netflix logo, again when the projectionist ran the wrong aspect ratio for seven minutes. By the closing credits the same audience stood and applauded for four minutes. Researching it had turned its director into a temporary vegan.
The story follows Mija, a girl living in the South Korean mountains with her grandfather and a giant genetically engineered animal called Okja. The Mirando Corporation, run by the image-obsessed Lucy Mirando, had sent 26 of these super pigs to farmers around the world a decade earlier as a publicity stunt. When a company zoologist crowns Okja the finest and ships her to New York, Mija sets out to bring her home, falling in with activists from the Animal Liberation Front, whose translator lies about her consent to their plan to track Okja through a hidden recorder.
Bong wrote the screenplay with the Welsh author Jon Ronson, who shaped the English-speaking roles. Netflix and Plan B Entertainment took the project on in November 2015 with a $50 million budget, and Darius Khondji came aboard as cinematographer. Shooting began in Seoul on April 22, 2016, moved to Vancouver that July and wrapped in August. Ahn Seo-hyun made her screen debut as Mija, alongside Tilda Swinton playing twin sisters, Paul Dano as the activist leader and Jake Gyllenhaal as a manic television zoologist.
To prepare for the slaughterhouse climax, Bong toured a Colorado slaughterhouse, and the visit put him and producer Dooho Choi off meat for a while. He described the film as being about capitalism, while Ronson predicted it would make viewers go vegetarian, though he insisted that had not been the aim. In the end Mija buys Okja's life with a solid gold pig her grandfather had saved for, and the pair slip away with a piglet smuggled to them through the fence.
The film went straight to Netflix on June 28, 2017, yet independent cinemas in South Korea still sold 300,953 tickets. Rotten Tomatoes counts 87% approval, and A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it a miracle of imagination and technique. The Times later ranked it among the ten most influential films of the decade, and the Criterion Collection issued it on disc in July 2022.
Source: Okja
