Park Chan-wook

Park Chan-wook (born 1963) is South Korea’s reigning auteur — director of the Vengeance Trilogy capped by Oldboy (2003, Grand Prix at Cannes), The Handmaiden (2016), and Decision to Leave (2022, Best Director at Cannes). His meticulous, formally daring style has made him one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation.

No Other Choice: automation as violence

His 2025 film No Other Choice — which opened the 30th Busan International Film Festival — adapts Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax into the story of a laid-off Korean paper-industry worker whose employer threatens to replace its workforce with AI. Park described the dying paper trade as an allegory for cinema itself: “The vanishing paper trade is not unlike what we face in cinema. Both are industries many once thought indispensable, yet both are fighting for survival.”

At Busan, Park called the anxiety over AI “a fear we all share,” noting that his own crew might already be using AI tools in VFX or the art department without his knowledge, and that the technology’s pace of development makes it impossible to estimate where it will stop. Notably, he frames himself as “fearful of AI” rather than anti-AI — a distinction he drew explicitly — even as South Korea’s film industry rapidly embraces generative production tools.