(Seoul) Most of the South Korean phenomenon series characters Squid Game are inspired by the life of its director Hwang Dong-hyuk who, through them, wanted to denounce the excesses of capitalism, meeting a planetary echo.
Squid Game features hundreds of characters from the most marginalized fringes of South Korea, participating in traditional games, which he played as a child.
The winners can take 33 million euros, the losers are killed.
Like Sang-woo, a troubled investment banker in Squid GameMr. Hwang graduated from the prestigious Seoul National University (SNU) but experienced financial problems.
Like Gi-hun, a laid-off employee and die-hard gamer, the filmmaker was raised by a widowed mother, living in poverty in partly basement accommodation like the one depicted in Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning corrosive satire.
It was one of his first experiences abroad that inspired him to Ali, a Pakistani migrant worker abused and exploited by his Korean employer, he told AFP.
“Absurd, bizarre and unrealistic”
“Korean society is very competitive. I was lucky enough to get out of it and go to a good university, ”says Hwang Dong-hyuk.
Mr. Hwang studied journalism at the SNU and was active in the pro-democracy movement. The main character of the series, Gi-hun, is named after one of his fellow wrestlers.
Once his diploma in hand, democracy was established. “I didn’t know what to do in the real world,” Hwang recalls.
PHOTO DONG-A ILBO, FRANCE-PRESS AGENCY
Hwang Dong-hyuk, director of Squid Game
At first, “watching movies was something I did to kill time.”
Borrowing his mother’s camera, he says he “discovered the joy of filming something and projecting it, and it changed my life. “
His first feature film, My Father (2007), was based on the true story of Aaron Bates, an adopted child in search of his biological father.
In 2011, his drama Silenced – inspired by a sexual abuse case involving children with disabilities – was a commercial success, as was its 2014 comedy Miss Granny, partly inspired by her single mother.
Three years later, he released the drama The fortress, hailed by the critics, which evokes a king of Korea of XVIIe century, besieged during a Chinese invasion.
Squid Game refers to several collective traumas that have shaped South Korean mentalities today, such as the Asian financial crisis of 1997 or the layoffs of Ssangyong Motor in 2009, two events that led to suicides.
“By referring to the layoffs of SsangYong Motor, I wanted to show that any middle class individual, in the world we live in today, can fall to the bottom of the economic ladder overnight,” Hwang Dong-hyuk explains to AFP.
For Jason Bechervaise, professor at Korea Soongsil Cyber University, this “established and recognized filmmaker for more than 10 years deals with social issues” while “finding ways to entertain his audience”.
“Mr. Hwang is part of a capitalist system and the success of his series means that he benefits from this system, but that does not mean that he does not fight against the very nature of this system,” he adds. -he.
Areum Jeong, a specialist in Korean cinema at Pittsburgh College at Sichuan University in China, points out that Mr. Hwang was raising social debates even before the series arrived on Netflix.
Silenced thus addressed “injustice, moral corruption, the unresolved problems of the Korean justice system, and ultimately motivated viewers to demand legislative reform,” she said.
Mr. Hwang wrote Squid Game ten years ago, but investors were reluctant and those who had read the script, he said, had deemed it “too absurd, bizarre and unrealistic.”
But the rise of streaming platforms offered him new perspectives, even if he had never imagined becoming such a global phenomenon.
Since it began airing on Netflix a month ago, the dystopian drama has already been seen by some 111 million subscribers, a record.
“I think viewers across the planet identify deeply with the theme of economic inequality” portrayed in Squid Game, comments the director, “especially in times of global pandemic”.