Netflix's Okja: How an unlikely love story melts the heart

SEOUL — South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s new film about the beautiful friendship between a young farm girl and a super pig called Okja (also the movie title) will premiere tomorrow, June 28, 11 p.m. on Netflix.

The big-budget film, which features Hollywood and Korean stars, has been earning raves since its world premiere at Cannes last May. (There has been some controversy, too, in relation to the traditional cinemas versus internet streaming debate. Global streaming giant Netflix produced the Okja with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. But that’s for the follow-up story).

The multi-genre film (action, fantasy, comedy and melodrama) from the director of Snowpiercer and The Host tells the story of special breed of pig with hippo-like features and the antics of a faithful pet dog being entrusted to the care of Mija (played by Ahn Seo-Hyun) and her grandfather in the mountains of South Korea.

After 10 years, however, the multinational conglomerate Mirando Corporation — headed by Lucy Mirando (played by Tilda Swinton) — reclaims the creature they had created to fulfill its intended “commercial purposes” in New York. This sets Mija on a mission to rescue her BFF and bring it home against all odds.

During a media junket held this month to promote the film, Tilda (who is also credited as a co-producer on the film) said, “It’s a homecoming for us to bring this beautiful pig home to where she should be on a mountain in Korea and for us, as filmmakers, because we are now all Korean filmmakers. It’s a beautiful thing to come and bring this film home and be with Korean fans, and to be with our comrade, director Bong Joon-Ho.”

Other cast members who attended the press junket and red-carpet event were Giancarlo Esposito, who plays the right-hand man to Tilda’s character; Steven Yeun and Daniel Henshall, who portray activists from the Animal Liberation Front; as well as Korean stars Byun Hee-Bong as the grandfather of Mija and Choi Woo-Shik as the scene-stealing, disillusioned employee for Mirando’s South Korean office. The STAR also joined two roundtable sessions — with Tilda, Steven and Giancarlo; and with director Bong and the film’s teen lead Ahn Seo Hyun.

The stellar cast also features Jake Gyllenhaal, Lily Collins, Paul Dano, among others.

Steven, born in South Korea but raised in the States, plays the only Asian-American character in the film. That his role makes the perfect metaphor or representation of how this production straddles two cultures (the challenges of pulling it off included) is not lost on him.

The actor, who shot to fame via the hit US series The Walking Dead, said, “K (name of his character) was a very interesting experience for me. I literally played K and I literally was K during the filming of the film. Actually, even right now, it is a surreal experience to stand right in the middle (of) where I look like — I’m from here — but there is the fact that I have to have a translator to translate for me. There’s the fact that I sometimes am not understood fully and in that same way, in America, there is a perception that someone that looks like me isn’t from there.”

He continued, “And so I ride this very lonely middle island line and I share that with all the immigrants that inhabit America. And so, it is that unique experience that I think was something that never has really been conveyed before in this type of way and I applaud director Bong and all the producers... in implementing and really pushing on the fact that this needed to be a Korean-American person because that’s really the aspect that it’s coming from.”

Meanwhile, when asked what the film means for them, Giancarlo said that Okja has “so many wonderful messages in it” including capitalist greed. But the Breaking Bad TV star said that what truly moved them was that the film made a statement — “a love story initially but (eventually) dealt with many things that we’re dealing with in the human condition today.”

He further said, “For me, this particular film is about wonder and enchantment. It begins with love, the love of self. Once you’re able to be completely in love with yourself evenly, honestly, truthfully and completely, then you’re able to share that love as Mija does with another being — whether it’d be an animal or a human being.

“It’s about courage. It’s about commitment. It’s about trust. Mija trusts herself and her instinct to be able to go and save this relationship against all odds, fighting the world to be able to regain her friend, her love, her caretaker, her partner.”

For Tilda, on the other hand, she doesn’t feel that there’s a message so much as a suggestion of an attitude.

“We have these two young creatures in the heart of this film: Mija and Okja. And, in many ways, the film is about growing up, and I think the suggestion is through their story, their quest that when we grow up — whatever age we’re at — we don’t have to give up love, we don’t have to give up a sense of family, we don’t have to give up trusting each other, and we don’t have to give up the idea that it’s possible not tell lies.

“I think the film is a lot about lies. Pretty much everybody in the film except for Okja and Mija tells a lie — even a small one at some point in the story… But, I think that is the suggestion of the film: That it’s possible to survive, that it’s possible to encounter the greater world and to be an integrated authentic being and not give it all up, and fight the good fight. It’s about an atmosphere, an atmosphere of integrity, I think.”

With Okja being a successful cross-cultural production, Tilda said that this is what makes cinema an extraordinary and particularly valuable platform. “Cinema is intergalactic. That is the point of it. It is, I would suggest, the most humanist art form of all. What it does is, it invites us when we’re especially but not exclusively in the dark against the big screen to put ourselves in the shoes of another person. That is what cinema does into the shoes not only of the protagonist but also into the eyes and the mind and the heart of the filmmaker.”

Tilda, who first worked with director Bong in the 2013 Snowpiercer, dished the ultimate praise for the South Korean filmmaker: “I think Okja is Bong Joon Ho.”