South Korean director and screenwriter Bong Joon-ho is the filmmaking flavour of the year so far as the awards season builds momentum. The 50 year-old already has an impeccable track record, but stepped up his game with his latest release, the darkly comic thriller PARASITE, a brilliant, powerfully revealing social satire about greed and class discrimination. Co-written with Han Jin-won, the eerie tale of a street-wise family, steeped in poverty, who hustle their way into working for a wealthy, but naive household premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or.

It has gone on to collect a growing number of accolades, including Golden Globe Director, Screenplay and Foreign Language and the Screen Actors Guild Best Ensemble nominations and winning a clutch of Critics’ Awards. It is also the official Korean entry for the Best International Feature Film (formerly Best Foreign Language Film) at next year’s Academy Awards and was listed in TIME magazine’s 10 Best Movies of 2019.

Joon-ho signed my sketch at the Curzon Mayfair last week where he delivered a lecture in the BAFTA Screenwriters series, before introducing PARASITE.