The Cinema on the Road: A Personal Essay on Cinema in Korea

Jang Sun-woo (born 20 March 1952) is a South Korean film director. Before his directorial debut, Jang made a name for himself by writing film criticism and scripts.

Jang Sun-woo is undoubtedly one of the most relevant and distinctive voices in contemporary Korean cinema. Since his debut feature, Seoul Jesus (1986), co-directed with Wan Son-u, his works have always displayed an incessant need to find and explore new resources in the language of cinema, and have often questioned audiences about controversial issues in Korean society. In the early 90s his films began to acquire international recognition, thus contributing to the detection of the first signs of a renewal in Korean cinema. In 1994, Hwaomkyung was awarded the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival; in 1996, the International Film Festival Rotterdam chose Jang as one of its Filmmakers in Focus.

A couple of his subsequent features, Timeless, Bottomless, Bad Movie (1998) and Lies (1999) stirred up great controversy and had serious problems with censorship. The latter, based on a novel that was accused of being pornographic and which had gotten its author imprisoned, was the first Korean film to compete at the Venice film festival in thirteen years, and found wide distribution in many European countries. His latest, long-in-the-works feature Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002) was also his most expensive and one of the most expensive Korean films ever. The ravaging flop of the film at the box office put Jang once again at the centre of polemics. —koreanfilm.org