With no prior experience or formal education in film, Park Hoonjung, born in 1975, fell into the film industry by accident. After he was expelled from college, he started to make a living writing scenario for video games, before taking a stab at movies and even comics. He was quickly noticed by some of the most preeminent Korean directors and made a name for himself penning the scripts for Kim Jeewoon’s <I Saw The Devil> (2010) and Ryoo Seungwan’s <The Unjust>...More

With no prior experience or formal education in film, Park Hoonjung, born in 1975, fell into the film industry by accident. After he was expelled from college, he started to make a living writing scenario for video games, before taking a stab at movies and even comics. He was quickly noticed by some of the most preeminent Korean directors and made a name for himself penning the scripts for Kim Jeewoon’s <I Saw The Devil> (2010) and Ryoo Seungwan’s <The Unjust> (2010), the latter of which won him Best Screenplay at the Blue Dragon Film Awards. He made his directorial debut with <The Showdown> (2010), a historical chamber piece drama set in the 17th century, with Korean soldiers involved each in their own way in the war between the Manchu and the Ming Empire. While his first directing effort wasn’t met with commercial success, Park’s follow-up <New World> (2012), a gangster thriller intended as the first of a trilogy and starring Choi Minshik, Lee Jungjae and Hwang Jungmin, was a commercial and critical hit. The film was sold to a large number of territories and travelled to many festivals, picking up the Jury Prize at the Beaune International Thriller Film Festivals and Best Film of the Focus Asia section at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival. He tackled a bigger project with the Colonial Era-set drama <The Tiger> (2015), which featured Choi Minshik as a hunter tracking down the last remaining tiger on the Korean Peninsula. The film served as the closing film of the Udine Far East Film Festival in 2016 but failed to break even. After founding his own film production company in 2016, he teamed up with Warner Bros to produce his next film <V.I.P.> (2017), an action thriller about a North-South joint operation set up to stop a North Korean serial killer. Park then tackled the fantastic genre with <The Witch : Part 1. The Subversion> (2018), which also was the film that launched Kim Dami’s career. After indulging in a small break by directing <Night in Paradise> (2019), a crime drama about a gangster who is hiding in Jeju after killing the boss of a rival gang, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, he returned to the Witch franchise with its sequel, <The Witch: Part 2, The Other One> (2021).Less