Born in 1971, Boo Jiyoung was raised alone by her mother in Jeju Island after her father passed away when she was still a child. After high school, she moved to Seoul and graduated from the prestigious Ehwa Womans University. She didn’t have any special interest in film, and it is purely a series of circumstances that led her to start in this industry; one day a friend from college asked for some help doing planning and PR work at film production and distribution company C...More

Born in 1971, Boo Jiyoung was raised alone by her mother in Jeju Island after her father passed away when she was still a child. After high school, she moved to Seoul and graduated from the prestigious Ehwa Womans University. She didn’t have any special interest in film, and it is purely a series of circumstances that led her to start in this industry; one day a friend from college asked for some help doing planning and PR work at film production and distribution company Cinema Service, and Boo was finally hired and worked there for a few years in the mid-1990s. While she did enjoy working in films, meeting directors, and discovering the early titles of the Korean New Wave, her actual job wasn’t her cup of tea. Instead, she tried her hand at filmmaking with the short <Spark> (1997), but she felt the need to a proper education in filmmaking and so she tried to enter the Korean Academy of Film Arts, eventually succeeding on her third try in 2000. The year 2000 had another surprise coming for her, as she also landed her first on-set job, working as an assistant director for Hong Sangsoo on <Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors> (2000). After graduation, she served as script supervisor on E J-yong’s <Untold Scandal> (2003). Her first feature film, <Sisters on the Road> (2009), was presented at the Busan International Film Festival, the International Women’s Film Festival in Seoul and the Tokyo International Women’s Film Festival. She has also collaborated on omnibus film projects, including the human rights project <If You Were Me 5> (2010) and the Jeonju International Film Festival’s <Short! Short! Short! 2011>. After the documentary <Myselves: The Actress No Makeup Project> (2011), she directed <Cart> (2014), dealing with the conditions of female temporary workers employed by supermarkets. The film was invited to the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. Since 2018, she has been teaching at the Korean Academy of Film Arts in a special program to assist debuting director on their first feature projects, and as such participated in the production of titles such as <Our Body> (2018), <Baseball Girl> (2019), <CLIMBING> (2020), <Missing Yoon> (2021) and <Aloners> (2021). Less