YOO Ha was an intelligent poet who captured the essence of the 1990s, an era when the values of democracy and ideology were fading away while popular culture and consumerism were exploding onto the social scene of Korea. ‘We Must Go to Apgujung-Dong on Windy Days’ and ‘Love of the Sewoon Shopping Mall’s Kid’ are among his representative collections of poems. He made his directorial debut with <We Must Go to Apgujung-Dong on Windy Days> (1992), which bears the...More

YOO Ha was an intelligent poet who captured the essence of the 1990s, an era when the values of democracy and ideology were fading away while popular culture and consumerism were exploding onto the social scene of Korea. ‘We Must Go to Apgujung-Dong on Windy Days’ and ‘Love of the Sewoon Shopping Mall’s Kid’ are among his representative collections of poems. He made his directorial debut with <We Must Go to Apgujung-Dong on Windy Days> (1992), which bears the same title as one of his books, but its lackluster box office performance put him into a long hibernation. YOO made his comeback to much fanfare with the screen adaptation of the novel <Marriage Is a Crazy Thing> (2002). He stuck to a traditional role of a director for the film by focusing on storytelling and drawing out strong performances from his cast, refraining from the experimental approach he employed for his debut feature. He is best known for making <Sprit of Jeet Keun Do - Once Upon a Time in High School> (2004), which focused on an introverted teenager [KWON Sang-woo], the gangster epic <A Dirty Carnival> (2006), and <A Frozen Flower> (2008), in which he cast [ZO In-sung] as a homosexual figure during the Koryo Dynasty. YOO Ha heads Opus Pictures in partnership with [LEE Tae-hun]. His most recent feature <Howling>, starring [SONG Kang-ho] and [LEE Na-young], was about a veteran male detective and rookie female detective investigating a murder mystery involving a mysterious animal who is a cross between a wolf and a dog. The film is based on the Japanese novel ‘Frozen Fang’. In 2015, YOO finally completed his thematic gang trilogy that already consisted of <Once Upon a Time in High School> and <A Dirty Carnival> when he released the blockbuster period gangster epic <Gangnam Blues>, which featured idol LEE Min-ho in his first leading film role.Less