Netflix Has Taken on ‘Yellow Door: In Search of Director Bong Joon-ho’s Unreleased Short Film’

Since it emerged that Netflix has taken on Yellow Door: In Search of Director Bong Joon-ho’s Unreleased Short Film (or rather, Yellow Door), a documentary diving through its origin, I’ve been very keen to seek out details on this practically untraceable subject. Being the major fan of the filmmaker that I am, anything Bong Joon-ho grabs my eye. His inventiveness in drawing out the stark contrasts common to Korean culture is unbelievable. How he blends that with an artistic sense into entertainment utterly unlike anything else defines him for me. It follows that an account taking me back to his genesis is one I’d anxiously await.

Bong enrolled in Yonsei University, allegedly one of those Korean institutes that served as the core of democratic motions, in 1988. There, he was actively engaging in student demonstrations. Before returning to college in 1992, he fulfilled his military service, and later, in partnership with close-by college students, he founded the “Yellow Door” film club. The documentary at hand takes its title from that society; it follows the course of uncovering Bong’s maiden work of cinema: Looking for Paradise, a stop-motion short he made as an essential part of Yellow Door.

The work, however, was never made public. In fact, White Man, a 16mm short film chronicling a man’s bizarre response to spotting a severed index finger on his way to work, is cited as Bong’s directorial debut. The film premiered in 1994, prior to his graduation from Yonsei University the following year. But technically, preceding White Man, Bong had Looking for Paradise, exclusively shown to a group of Yellow Door club members on Christmas Day in 1992.

According to Korean news reports, producer Kim Hyung-ok of Broccoli Pictures and director Lee Hyuk-rae, a fellow Yellow Door member and a viewer of Looking for Paradise, were the driving forces behind the documentary. Lee, who heads up the initiative, spoke with the club associates (who had seen the film), notably actors Woo-hyeon, Ahn Nae-sang, and director Choi Jong-tae, for their thoughts on it while also reflecting on an era of movie buffs in the early 1990s: their recollections of the film club and Bong overseeing its valued video library. It will additionally record personal anecdotes from Bong himself.

Lee says in a KOFICE (Korea Foundation for International Culture Exchange) article that the documentary promises to give viewers a chance to peek into Bong Joon-ho’s formative years. Also noteworthy should be the portrayal of an age in Korean cinema that saw the rise of artistic ventures amid a creative boom that followed Korea’s protracted occupation by an exacting iron rule. It is scheduled to stream this year; I hope that comes soonest.