How Korean Directors Won Over Cannes, the Oscars and the Emmys

Berlin first: 1961 to 1994

Korea's first win at any of these five events came at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival. Kang Dae-jin's The Coachman (마부) won one of that year's two Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prizes; the other went to Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman Is a Woman.² Wikipedia describes The Coachman as the first Korean film to win a major international award.³ A year later, Shin Sang-ok (신상옥) won the same prize for To the Last Day (이 생명 다하도록).⁴

Then came a 32-year gap. In 1994, Jang Sun-woo (장선우) won Berlin's Alfred Bauer Prize, a Silver Bear for a film that "opens new perspectives on cinematic art", with Hwa-Om-Kyung (화엄경).⁵⁶ Those three are the only wins in the table from before 2002.

The festival breakthroughs of the 2000s

The run began at Cannes in May 2002, when Im Kwon-taek (임권택) shared Best Director with Paul Thomas Anderson for Chihwaseon (취화선), a historical drama.⁷ It was Korea's first Best Director award at Cannes.⁸ That September, Lee Chang-dong (이창동) won Venice's Silver Lion for Best Director for Oasis (오아시스).⁹ From 2003 to 2004 he also served as South Korea's Minister of Culture and Tourism.¹⁸

2004 brought three wins. Kim Ki-duk (김기덕) took Best Director at both Berlin, for Samaritan Girl (사마리아), and Venice, for 3-Iron (빈집): two Best Director prizes for two different films in the same year.¹⁰¹²¹³ In between, at Cannes, Park Chan-wook's (박찬욱) Oldboy (올드보이) won the Grand Prix, the festival's second-highest honour.¹¹¹⁴ That year's jury president, Quentin Tarantino, had lobbied for it to win the Palme d'Or, which went instead to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.¹⁴

Park added Berlin's Alfred Bauer Prize for I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (싸이보그지만 괜찮아) in 2007, then a share of the Cannes Jury Prize for the vampire film Thirst (박쥐) in 2009, alongside Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank.¹⁵¹⁶ Lee Chang-dong won Best Screenplay at Cannes for Poetry (시) in 2010.¹⁷ In 2012, Kim Ki-duk's Pietà (피에타) won the Golden Lion, Venice's top prize.¹⁹ It was the first time in this table that a Korean film had won the top prize at Cannes, Venice or Berlin; Cannes followed seven years later.¹

Parasite: a Palme d'Or and four Oscars

Bong Joon Ho's (봉준호) Parasite (기생충) premiered at Cannes on May 21, 2019, and won the Palme d'Or, the first Korean film to do so. Wikipedia notes it was also the first film to win by a unanimous jury vote since Blue Is the Warmest Colour in 2013.²¹²⁰

At the 92nd Academy Awards on February 9, 2020, it won four of its six nominations: Best Picture (presented to its producers, Kwak Sin-ae, 곽신애, and Bong), Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (Bong and Han Jin-won, 한진원) and Best International Feature Film, which the Academy lists under the submitting country, South Korea, with Bong named as director.²² It was the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture, and one of only four films to have won both the Palme d'Or and Best Picture.²¹

Parasite went on to gross $258.1 million worldwide, including $71.4 million in South Korea and $53.7 million in the US and Canada.²¹ Its five wins in this table are the most for any single title.

Squid Game at the Emmys

Squid Game (오징어 게임) was created, written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk (황동혁) for Netflix, which released the first season on September 17, 2021, in more than 190 countries.²⁹ At the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards it received 14 nominations and became the first non-English-language series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series.²⁹²⁷

At the main ceremony on September 12, 2022, Hwang won Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for the first episode, "Red Light, Green Light", and Lee Jung-jae won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. The two became the first Asians to win those categories.²⁷³⁰

The show had already won four Creative Arts Emmys that month: Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for Lee Yoo-mi (이유미), production design (Chae Kyoung-sun, Gim En-jee and Kim Jeong-gon), special visual effects and stunt performance. That made six Emmys in all.²⁸²⁹ Only Hwang's directing award is in the table, since it is the one that went to the series' director.

The run since

Hong Sang-soo (홍상수) has won four Silver Bears at Berlin in five festivals: Best Director for The Woman Who Ran (도망친 여자) in 2020, Best Screenplay for Introduction (인트로덕션) in 2021, and the Grand Jury Prize for both The Novelist's Film (소설가의 영화) in 2022 and A Traveler's Needs (여행자의 필요) in 2024.^2324253132

Park Chan-wook won Best Director at Cannes in 2022 for Decision to Leave (헤어질 결심), his fourth win in the table.²⁶ In May 2026 he presided over the Cannes main-competition jury.³⁵

In September 2026, Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love (가능한 사랑) won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice.³³ It is his first feature since Burning (2018), a South Korea–US co-production in Korean that Netflix distributes worldwide, and South Korea's submission for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards.³⁴

What the record shows

By event, Berlin accounts for 9 of the 24 wins, Cannes for 6, Venice and the Oscars for 4 each and the Emmys for 1. Three came in the 41 years from 1961 to 2001 and 21 in the 25 years from 2002 to 2026. Five directors account for 19 rows: Bong Joon Ho (5, including the Best Picture award he shares with Kwak Sin-ae), Park Chan-wook (4), Hong Sang-soo (4), Kim Ki-duk (3) and Lee Chang-dong (3).

The recent wins also reach beyond the three festivals. Since 2020, five of the table's rows have come from the Oscars and the Emmys, and streaming is part of the picture: Squid Game is a Netflix series and Netflix distributes Possible Love.²⁹³⁴

The newest Korea-linked Oscars sit outside the table. At the 98th Academy Awards in March 2026, KPop Demon Hunters won Best Animated Feature (for Maggie Kang, 강민지, Chris Appelhans and Michelle L.M. Wong) and Best Original Song for "Golden".³⁶ It is an American film, produced by Sony Pictures Animation for Netflix, so it doesn't meet the table's rule.³⁷ Commentators cited on its Wikipedia page read it as a new phase of the Korean Wave: Cho Jae-hyon of the Hankook Ilbo argued that Korean-themed content would increasingly be produced abroad rather than made in Korea and exported, and Moon Dong-yeol of The Hankyoreh described a shift away from production solely within South Korea.³⁷