Despite a degree in metal engineering, WANG Min-cheol, born in 1975, has always loved movies. By his own admission, he wasn’t studying that much and instead did a lot for the film club of his college. His first job after graduation was as a video designer of Flash animations. When his girlfriend and now wife expressed her desire to study in Germany, he followed her and, after learning German for a year and as the result of many tries, entered the Academy of Media Arts in C...More

Despite a degree in metal engineering, WANG Min-cheol, born in 1975, has always loved movies. By his own admission, he wasn’t studying that much and instead did a lot for the film club of his college. His first job after graduation was as a video designer of Flash animations. When his girlfriend and now wife expressed her desire to study in Germany, he followed her and, after learning German for a year and as the result of many tries, entered the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. As he would still have trouble communicating nuanced and precise instructions to German-speaking actors, WANG eventually turned to documentaries. He came back to Korea in 2012, more than a decade later, only to notice that much had changed in the meantime, starting with the neighborhood he used to live in that had been totally razed and replaced by high apartment complexes. This prompted his interest in things that don’t last, and as a result wound up working as first assistant director on the documentary film <The Hospice>, which followed people at the end of life. While preparing a performance mixing live music and old video footage of the town of Cheongju for the Cheongju Museum of Art, it was suggested to him that he also include present-day images, and so came to film Cheongju Municipal Zoo. These footage were later used and complemented to constitute WANG’s first directorial feature documentary, <Garden, Zoological> (2018), following zoo keepers and exploring the roles zoos have nowadays as the natural habitat of animals is disappearing. The film won the Grand Prize at the Seoul Eco Film Festival and the Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award of the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival for <Garden, Zoological> (2018).Less