The Big Bold Beautiful Journey of Kogonada!

Kogonada is unlike any other filmmaker we’ve seen before, because he, like us, found his love for film on the Internet. Born in South Korea and emigrating to the States as a child, Kogonada did not study film in the halls of some prestigious institution but instead by, well, watching them and curating his thoughts into dozens of video essays. After a decade of commissioned video essay work, Kogonada took the jump into feature filmmaking, debuting in 2017 with the melancholy film Columbus. Four years later, Kogonada delved into artificial intelligence and his own feelings on immigration with the soft sci-fi film After Yang. Then, last month, Kogonada debuted his third feature, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, starring huge names Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell. Though he has made only a few films, Kogonada wears his influences on his sleeve, learning not only from the old masters but from his contemporaries how to make a heartfelt, character-driven drama, and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is proof that he can also work well with a large budget and huge stars. 

Kogonada published his first video essay in January of 2012 on "Breaking Bad", analyzing the hit television series’ shot compositions and strange-for-TV camera work. Brought up on both American and international cinema, Kogonada was inspired by the likes of Wes Anderson and Hirokazu Kore-eda, directors whose fingerprints are easy to spot in Kogonada’s own film work. His commissioned essays for the British Film Institute -- on filmmakers like Yasujirô Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Kore-eda -- cemented his reputation as someone who could take the language of cinema apart and put it back together with precision and care. 

Titles of his video essays include "Hands of Bresson and Wes Anderson: Centered", and these works became required viewing for cinephiles online, showing that Kogonada was not a critic but a filmmaker in training. Kogonada became a constant student of cinema, using his essays to sharpen his keen visual instincts while keeping an emotional core at the center of his observations. 

By the time he made his feature debut with Columbus in 2017, it was clear that Kogonada was not just parroting his influences but attempting to build something new. Starring John Cho and a young Haley Lu Richardson in her breakout role, the film is a meditation on architecture, grief, and the small connections that tether us when we feel most lost. Columbus, Indiana’s modernist architecture becomes both a beautiful backdrop and a metaphor, as the characters circle around building the same way they circle around their own vulnerabilities. 

Richardson delivers a breakout performance, grounding the film’s melancholy with warmth and curiosity, perfectly setting her up for the naive but rebellious character she played in Season 2 of "The White Lotus". Critics immediately latched onto the Ozu-like stillness in Kogonada’s framing, but what really made the film stick was its tenderness. It was a debut that announced a new director as an artist with a fully formed voice. 

Kogonada doubled down on that voice with After Yang in 2021, a meditative, stripped-down sci-fi about family, culture, memory, and grief. Working with A24 and headlining Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith, the film took the "quiet cinema" sensibility of Columbus and expanded it into a near-future world where androids serve as cultural companions. Yang (Justin H. Min) is the family’s android purchased to help the newly adopted Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) better understand her Chinese culture, and when he short-circuits and functionally passes away, the family must learn about how to go through grieving something that is non-human. Instead of making AI the villain, Yang serves as a reminder of what it means to be alive.

It’s also one of the final films scored by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose music lingers like a memory long after the credits roll. After Yang confirmed Kogonada as one of the most important new voices in science-fiction, not because of big effects, but because he treated the genre as a mirror for the human soul.

And now, with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Kogonada has stepped into bigger territory. The romantic fantasy, written by Seth Reiss and starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, feels like a departure from his quieter dramas but not an abandonment of them. The film’s conceit -- two strangers traveling through magical doors to revisit key memories -- lets Kogonada bring his obsession with time, memory, and intimacy into a larger, more accessible package. 

Yes, the film has moments that lean too far toward saccharine sentimentality, and the romance doesn’t always strike the balance it’s aiming for, but there’s something refreshing about watching Kogonada embrace big emotions instead of hiding them in subtext. The visuals are lush, the concept inventive, and the willingness to take such a bold swing shows he’s not content to stay in the indie lane. If nothing else, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey proves that Kogonada can make a studio romance without losing his meditative touch.

What makes Kogonada compelling is that he’s never just chasing trends. Whether through YouTube essays, a small-town indie, or a glossy studio romance, he’s still asking the same core questions: What do we remember, and how do we connect? His films thrive on negative space, on what isn’t said, on the quiet moments between people. Even when he stumbles, like in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, you can feel the ambition pulsing underneath.

For young filmmakers and cinephiles, Kogonada’s rise is proof that studying film with obsession and passion can pay off. He’s living evidence that you don’t need to come up through film school pipelines to make movies that matter; you can start with video essays and end up directing Margot Robbie. Whether his next move is back to intimate indies or another swing at studio spectacle, Kogonada has already carved out his lane: films that are deliberate, emotional, and unshakably his. And in today’s Hollywood, that might be the boldest journey of all.