Biography: Park Kwang-hyun

Park Kwang-Hyun grew up with his grandma in the countryside. He fell in love with the art of filmmaking when he was in primary school and began viewing his first films, such as Superman and Robot Taekwon V. Park would spend the entire day talking about movies with his pals and going to the movies whenever he could.

Park studied Visual Design at Hongik University for his undergraduate degree. When it comes to music and arts, the Hongdae district is considered one of Korea’s most diverse and influential areas; many indie bands started in Hongdae clubs before becoming famous, and many artists, designers, and authors have developed from this milieu.

After graduation, Park founded his own company with a few buddies and became one of the most well-known C.F. (Commercial Film) industry. He shot many famous commercials with top actors, from Kyobo Life with Choi Min-Sik to the McDonald’s “Don’t Bet Your Life” series with Shin Ha-Kyun and I’m Won-hee.

He continued to write his script on his way to work, hoping that it would one day become his first feature film. In 2001, he approached playwright/filmmaker Jang Jin, claiming to be a fan and requesting that he read his script. Jang attracted Park into his production company, Film It Suda, which had performers and directors with theatre backgrounds. He was the odd man out in Jang’s circle, the only “style man” among those broadly interested in language and situation-based drama or comedy.

Park directed My Nike in 2002, which gets voted the best short film of the year at the Cannes Film Festival. Its authentic yet droll character assessments remain unexpectedly warm and sympathetic. This story tells about a teen (Ryu DeokHwan) from an urban lower-middle-class family whose biggest dream in the world is to buy a pair of Nike shoes. They are based on spending habits from the 1980s when Korea was first becoming a consumer country, and its people were beginning to be characterized by what they buy and own, and they have a sense of pathos about class distinctions. My Nike was full of nostalgia, based on Park’s childhood recollections as a youngster growing up in 1980s Korea and tinged with fantasy (with an homage to E.T.).

Jang Jin took with Park’s cinematic humanism that he provided him with a script for a new project, a stage adaptation of one of his plays, Welcome to Dongmakgol. In 1950, an American pilot found themselves in a remote village where the locals did not see the outside world. Welcome to Dongmakgol, Park’s first feature film, drew more than 8 million spectators in 2005, making it the second-highest-grossing picture of the year and among the highest-grossing films of all time in Korea.

Park’s long-awaited second film was initially titled Kwon Bob and starred Jo In-sung as a high school kid with superhuman strength who fights injustice in a tiny town. Still, production gets postponed after financier C.J. Entertainment backed out after Sector 7’s box office disaster in 2011. In 2013, the sci-fi fantasy blockbuster renamed The Fist and relaunched. It is the largest Korea-China co-production to date, with China Film Group and Pegasus & Taihe Entertainment contributing 30% of the US$20 million budget.