alr

Barking Dogs Never Bite
(Flandersui gae)

Screening on Film
Directed by Bong Joon-ho.
With Lee Sung-jae, Bae Doo-na.
South Korea, 2003, 35mm, color, 106 min.
Korean with English subtitles.

Bong’s feature debut offers a stinging critique of the economic divide between the haves and have-nots in an offbeat story about an aspiring unemployed professor, his pregnant yuppie wife and a young woman working in the office of his apartment complex, who has no particular ambitions or, seemingly, much of a future. A yapping dog in the building sets off the twisted chain of events that ultimately draws them together in a pitch-black comedy that pairs its bleak view of human nature with a score of jazz and cool electronica. Contemporary Seoul is depicted as a media-crazed city saturated with corruption at the higher levels, a society given over to the venal and the banal.

Part of film series

Read more

Bong Joon-ho.
The Pleasures and Terrors of Genre

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

Read more

Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Illusory Tableaux of Georges Méliès

Read more

Activism and Post-Activism. Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981-2022

Read more

Fables of the Reconstruction. Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias

Read more

Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

Read more

Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

Read more

Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

Read more

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue