Institute Film Series: Snowpiercer

Based on the graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette, Bong Joon-ho’s film is set in a post-apocalyptic world that has been frozen solid in a failed effort to counter the planet’s warming. The catastrophe has left a society in which strict social order is brutally enforced on a train continually circling the globe. The story meshes humor and violence in a fable about climate change and class struggle. In The Guardian, Andrew Pulver writes: “There is something of absurdist theater, though developed to grotesque extremes—as if Terry Gilliam had been hired to rewrite Samuel Beckett.” Snowpiercer has won numerous accolades in Asia and North America.

This film runs 2 hours and 6 minutes.

A post-screening discussion will be led by David Bond, Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action, Bennington College, and Daniel Aldana Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, both Members in the School of Social Science.