Biography: Ryoo Seung Wan

Ryoo Seung-wan is a  famous South Korean film director born on December 15, 1973. Since he was a child, Ryoo Seung-wan has been a lover of Hong Kong action cinema’s no-holds-barred action. He was such an admirer of the Shaw Brothers and Jack Chan that he took up taekwondo and saved for years to get an 8mm camera. His parents died of tragic death, still in middle school, which forced Ryoo to drop out of school to support his family as the young head of the household, working various odd jobs.

He eventually decided to enroll in a film program, where he met Park Chan-wook, a young man who would rapidly become a close friend. He served as the lighting director on one of Bong Joon-ho’s earlier short films, Incoherence, because of his connections. Ryoo made his debut with the short film in 1996 and then went on to work as an assistant director and actor in Park’s feature (1997). After his shorts and winning Best Picture at the Busan International Short Feature Festival and the Seoul Independent Film Festival.

He got an offer for the chance to release an anthology film consisting of the two winning pictures and two other movies he would make specifically for the occasion. It received immediate acclaim from critics, who saw in it all the buoyant spirit of amateur films but with the abilities of a professional filmmaker to sustain it. Ryoo has earned the label “Action Kid of the Korean Film Industry.” After a string of notable films in the action and thriller genre, including No Blood, No Tears (2001), Arahan (2004), Crying Fist (2004), City of Violence (2006), and Dachimawa Lee are all films directed by Dachimawa Lee (2007).

Ryoo’s pulpy crime thrillers are known for their hard-edged, inventive aesthetic, featuring spectacular action sequences. His 2010 crime thriller The Unjust, which took a severe look at corruption in the affluent echelons of modern Korean society and garnered 2.8 million admissions, was a critical and commercial triumph. Ryoo returned three years later (2012), a story about four operatives from divided Korea living secret and complex lives in Berlin under false identities. In 2014, Ryoo starred in the 3D horror omnibus that premiered at the Jeonju International Film Festival, and he also filmed his noirish detective thriller with HWANG Jung-min.

With more than 13 million admissions since its premiere in 2015, the latter was Ryoo’s most significant commercial triumph to date. He subsequently took a step back to focus on his career as a producer at Filmmaker R & K, where he worked on films including SVAHA: THE SIXTH FINGER (2018) and EXIT, a catastrophe comedy (2019). Ryoo returned to directing in 2021 with Escape from Mogadishu, which offered a new challenge for the director because it was shot entirely outside of Korea in Morocco.