Kogonada

Directing

Kogonada

Seoul, South Korea

Park Joong Eun (Korean: 박중은), known professionally as Kogonada, is a South Korean-born American filmmaker. He is known for his video essays that analyze the content, form, and structure of various films and television series. The essays frequently use narration and editing as lenses and highlight a director's aesthetic. Kogonada regularly contributes to Sight & Sound and is often commissioned by The Criterion Collection to create supplemental videos for its home video releases. He has also written, directed and edited the feature films Columbus (2017) and After Yang (2021). He also directed two episodes of the Star Wars Disney+ series The Acolyte (2024).

Acting credits

Behind the camera

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey poster
6.2

Sarah and David are single strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and soon, through a surprising twist of fate, find themselves on a funny, fantastical, sweeping adventure together where they get to re-live important moments from their respective pasts, illuminating how they got to where they are in the present... and possibly getting a chance to alter their futures.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

2025

After Yang poster
6.4

When his young daughter's beloved companion — an android named Yang — malfunctions, Jake searches for a way to repair him. In the process, Jake discovers the life that has been passing in front of him, reconnecting with his wife and daughter across a distance he didn't know was there.

After Yang

2022

After Yang poster
6.4

When his young daughter's beloved companion — an android named Yang — malfunctions, Jake searches for a way to repair him. In the process, Jake discovers the life that has been passing in front of him, reconnecting with his wife and daughter across a distance he didn't know was there.

After Yang

2022

Zi poster
2.0

In Hong Kong, a young woman haunted by visions of her future self meets a stranger who changes the course of her night -- and possibly her life.

Zi

2026

Zi poster
2.0

In Hong Kong, a young woman haunted by visions of her future self meets a stranger who changes the course of her night -- and possibly her life.

Zi

2026

Zi poster
2.0

In Hong Kong, a young woman haunted by visions of her future self meets a stranger who changes the course of her night -- and possibly her life.

Zi

2026

Columbus poster
7.1

When a renowned architecture scholar falls suddenly ill during a speaking tour, his son Jin finds himself stranded in Columbus, Indiana - a small Midwestern city celebrated for its many significant modernist buildings. Jin strikes up a friendship with Casey, a young architecture enthusiast who works at the local library.

Columbus

2017

Columbus poster
7.1

When a renowned architecture scholar falls suddenly ill during a speaking tour, his son Jin finds himself stranded in Columbus, Indiana - a small Midwestern city celebrated for its many significant modernist buildings. Jin strikes up a friendship with Casey, a young architecture enthusiast who works at the local library.

Columbus

2017

Linklater: On Cinema and Time poster
7.2

If cinema is the art of time, Linklater is one of its most thoughtful and engaged directors. Unlike other filmmakers identified as auteurs, Linklater’s distinction is not found on the surface of his films, in a visual style or signature shot, but rather in their DNA, as ongoing conversations with cinema, which is to say, with time itself. A visual essay produced by Sight and Sound.

Linklater: On Cinema and Time

2013

Columbus Story poster
NR

A short film about the history of Columbus, Indiana and how it became the Columbus of architects and artists.

Columbus Story

2019

Elemental poster
NR

40,000 years in the making: Kogonada's video essay created for The Connected Series.

Elemental

2015

Criterion Designs poster
NR

Kogonada's video essay made in conjunction with the release of Criterion Designs, a 300-page book, which features highlights from cover art commissioned by the Criterion Collection, including never-before-seen sketches and concept art.

Criterion Designs

2014

Lunch Line poster
NR

Reframes the school lunch debate through an examination of the program's surprising past, uncertain present, and possible future. Six kids from one of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago set out to fix school lunch and end up at the White House. Their unlikely journey parallels the dramatic transformation of school lunch from a weak patchwork of local anti-hunger efforts to a robust national feeding program. The film tracks key moments in school food and child nutrition from 1940s, 1960s, and 1980s to the present – revealing political twists, surprising alliances, and more common ground than people realize.

Lunch Line

2010

Trick or Truth poster
6.8

"I wanted to write a fantasy with the atomic bomb as the theme." – Nobuhiko Obayashi

Trick or Truth

2014

What Is Neorealism? poster
7.5

Filmmaker Kogonada unpicks what defines the Golden Age of Italian cinema with a side-by-side comparison of two edits of the same film, one according to Italian director Vittorio De Sica, and the other according to Hollywood producer David O. Selznick.

What Is Neorealism?

2017

Young Arabs poster
NR

Young Arabs takes viewers inside an elite preparatory school in heart of Cairo, Egypt. The film offers a quiet encounter with a collection of students as they reflect on God, America, terrorism, marriage, the Middle East, and more.

Young Arabs

2008

The Way of Folk poster
NR

In this brand new featurette, executive producer T Bone Burnett and the Coen brothers discuss the history of some of the songs that heard in Inside Llywin Davies and possible origin of the stories they tells, the folk movement during the 1960s and the social and cultural ideas that it represented, the authenticity and the identity of folk music and the balance between the two, the future of folk music, etc. Included with the featurette are illustrations by Drew Christie. The featurette was created exclusively for Criterion in 2015.

The Way of Folk

2016

Way of Ozu poster
6.8

Kogonada’s video essay showcases the similarities of the multiple films Yasujiro Ozu made in his lifetime. Ozu created a genre of his own – a way of filmmaking that was cultivated and nourished throughout Ozu’s career as a filmmaker.

Way of Ozu

2016

Once There Was Everything poster
7.0

Kogonada looks at how the motif of doors reverberates through Robert Bresson's work.

Once There Was Everything

2017

Godard in Fragments poster
6.5

In the 1960s, pioneering French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard introduced the world to a new cinematic lexicon, generated from his innovative, auteurist style. Between 1960 and 1967 alone, he made fifteen features (beginning with his groundbreaking début, Breathless)—and it’s this period that regular Criterion Collection contributor Kogonada explores in a new video essay highlighting the iconic director’s signature themes and devices.

Godard in Fragments

2016

Restoring the Apu Trilogy poster
8.0

In 1993, the original negatives of Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy were burned in a massive nitrate fire at a laboratory in London. Even though there were no technologies available at the time capable of fully restoring such badly damaged film elements, the Academy Film Archive held on to them. And now times have changed.

Restoring the Apu Trilogy

2015

Dreams of Cinema poster
NR

This new video essay by filmmaker Kogonada explores the many layers of director Francois Truffaut's masterpiece "Day for Night."

Dreams of Cinema

2015

Dreams of Cinema poster
NR

This new video essay by filmmaker Kogonada explores the many layers of director Francois Truffaut's masterpiece "Day for Night."

Dreams of Cinema

2015

No artwork available
NR

A video essay by filmmaker Kogonada exploring the use of doors in the 13 feature films of Robert Bresson

Doors of Bresson

2026