Biography: O Muel

O Muel is a screenwriter and director from South Korea. O Muel was born and educated on Jeju Island in 1971. At Jeju National University, he studied Korean art. He became the director of Terror J, a Jeju-based culture collective, in 1998 and developed Flower for a Head, an annual street art festival. O is also the artistic director of the theatrical company Japari Research Center and co-director of the Jeju Independent Film Society. O is a director who has worked on two short films and several feature pictures. O picked Jeju as the setting for all of his works as a filmmaker, focusing on the island’s distinctive lifestyle, nature, and people. In 2003, he debuted as a filmmaker with two short films, Putting on Lipstick Thickly and Flower for a Head. With Nostalgia, O made his feature directing debut in 2009. Jiseul (which means “potato”), O’s fourth feature film, received both domestic and international critical praise. O recruited non-professional local actors who spoke in their native Jeju dialect to play a group of villagers who hid in a cave for 60 days, enduring cold and famine, to flee from soldiers on shoot-to-kill orders during the Jeju Uprising April 1948. The film shot entirely in black-and-white, had a modest budget of 210 million, with a portion of the funds donated through crowdfunding.

It garnered four awards at the 17th Busan International Film Festival in 2012: Best Director from the Director’s Guild of Korea, Citizen Reviewers’ Award, CGV Movie Collage Award, and NETPAC Jury Award. “For focusing on a dramatic historical event unobtrusively with superb B/W cinematography, expressing the sadness and psyche of both the victims and the aggressors,” the NETPAC jury said. Jesus was the first Korean film to receive the prestigious World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. It was named Best Film at the 1st Wildflower Film Awards and received the Cyclo d’Or at the 19th Vesoul International Film Festival of Asian Cinema. Jesus opened in South Korean cinemas in 2013 and, thanks to positive word of mouth, became the best-selling Korean independent drama and the most successful Korean film to be shown on fewer than 100 screens after his triumph, with 144,602 viewers breaking that record. O’s fifth feature film, Golden Chariot in the Sky (2014), follows three brothers on a road journey, with the youngest dreaming of starting a band named “Golden Chariot” with his village friends. It was the opening film of the 10th Jecheon International Music & Film Festival and had its international premiere at the 49th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

After opting for an elliptic arthouse plot, O Muel’s sixth feature, “Eyelids,” earned the CGV Arthouse Award at the Busan International Film Festival.