Okja (2017)
- During the filming of Okja, An Seo-hyun improvised one of the most famous lines in the movie.
- Bong Joon Ho originally wanted a completely different ending for the film, but test audiences preferred the one we see today.
- The original script for Okja was written over a decade before production finally began in 2017.
Okja is a 2017 South Korean-American adventure drama directed by Bong Joon-ho. Seo-Hyun Ahn stars as Mija, a young girl in the South Korean countryside who has spent ten years raising Okja, a massive, gentle, genetically engineered "super pig" that was left with Mija's grandfather as part of a corporate competition run by the Mirando Corporation, led by the perky, image-obsessed CEO Lucy Mirando, played by Tilda Swinton. When the corporation reclaims Okja for a PR event in New York and eventual slaughter, Mija embarks on a desperate rescue mission, aided by the Animal Liberation Front led by Jay, played by Paul Dano.
Bong Joon-ho, two years before Parasite, created a film that was simultaneously a thrilling adventure, a biting corporate satire, and a devastating critique of industrial meat production. The slaughterhouse sequence was among the most emotionally harrowing depictions of industrial animal processing in cinema. Okja premiered at Cannes and debuted on Netflix, earning widespread acclaim.
