Parasite, the hit film from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, was the most talked-about movie of 2019 in its home country, a serious candidate for a Best Picture nod at the Oscars (and a presumed shoo-in for Best Foreign Language Film), and is on track to gross $20 million in the U.S., a windfall for a non-English title. The film checks multiple boxes. It is a hilarious farce, a boy-meets-girl tale with a twist, and a heartbreaking send-up of income inequality in South Korea. In short, Parasite has struck a chord worldwide at a time of maximum rich-versus-poor tensions.
It is all the more noteworthy, then, that Miky Lee, the film’s executive producer, is vice chairman of CJ Entertainment and a granddaughter of the founder of Samsung, from which CJ was spun out. In other words, the film’s top financial backer is a member of the most prominent family in South Korea—her first cousin is Jay Y. Lee, the de facto head of Samsung Electronics—the epitome of the social elite that Parasite demonizes.
For CJ, backing Parasite and Bong, whom it has financed before, is business as usual. What’s more, Miky Lee has a track record of supporting artists, particularly Korean actors who have crossed powerful interests at home. “Miky Lee has taken a risk in investing in dicey and innovative films for the past decade or so,” says Jinsoo An, a professor in the University of California at Berkeley’s East Asian studies department who studies Korean cinema. He cites Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden and Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird, two films CJ distributed. Lee’s background notwithstanding, says An, her company is “liberal and progressive,” and she is “the most influential and powerful female film producer in South Korea.”
A version of this article appears in the January 2020 issue of Fortune.
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