Kim Jihoon, born in 1971, studied filmmaking at Hanyang University and started his filmmaking career with a short film, <Greenhouse> (1997). He honed his skills in the directorial staff of Park Kihyung’s <Whispering Corridors> (1998) and Lee Sangin’s <Rush> (1999). He made a successful feature debut with <Mokpo, Gangster’s Paradise> (2004), starring Cho Jaehyun and Cha Inpyo, which was intended originally as a pure action noir but was changed in...More

Kim Jihoon, born in 1971, studied filmmaking at Hanyang University and started his filmmaking career with a short film, <Greenhouse> (1997). He honed his skills in the directorial staff of Park Kihyung’s <Whispering Corridors> (1998) and Lee Sangin’s <Rush> (1999). He made a successful feature debut with <Mokpo, Gangster’s Paradise> (2004), starring Cho Jaehyun and Cha Inpyo, which was intended originally as a pure action noir but was changed into a comedy that drew in close to two million moviegoers. He then made <May 18> (2007), a movie about Gwangju People’s Uprising of May 18, 1980. Even with the serious subject matter, the movie attracted more than seven million viewers. He then made <Sector 7> (2011), a 3D SF film about a death-or-life battle with an unidentified life form on an oil drill ship in the middle of a high sea. Kim remained in the disaster genre for his next film <The Tower>. The inferno flick, released at Christmas time in 2012, was another hit for the blockbuster director, following the disappointing domestic returns of his previous feature. After a long time away from the director’s chair, he came back in 2021 with a totally different approach to his disaster films as well as a return to the comedy genre of his first feature with <Sinkhole> (2021).Less