The Most Famous
FILM DIRECTORS from North Korea
This page contains a list of the greatest North Korean Film Directors. The pantheon dataset contains 2,041 Film Directors, 1 of which were born in North Korea. This makes North Korea the birth place of the 72nd most number of Film Directors behind Lebanon, and Syria.
Top 1
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary North Korean Film Directors of all time. This list of famous North Korean Film Directors is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Shin Sang-ok (1926 - 2006)
With an HPI of 64.06, Shin Sang-ok is the most famous North Korean Film Director. His biography has been translated into 25 different languages on wikipedia.
Shin Sang-ok (Korean: 신상옥; Hanja: 申相玉; c. 1926 – April 11, 2006), anglicized as Simon Sheen, was a South Korean filmmaker who directed 74 films in a career spanning over five decades. He is best known in South Korea for his efforts during the 1950s and 1960s, many of them collaborations with his wife Choi Eun-hee. Shin posthumously received the Gold Crown Cultural Medal, the country's top honor for an artist. In 1978, Shin and Choi were kidnapped by order of Kim Jong-il, who wanted them to improve the North Korean film industry. The couple remained in captivity for 8 years and Shin directed seven films for Kim, including An Emissary of No Return, Runaway (both 1984), Love, Love, My Love, Salt, and Pulgasari (produced in 1985), before they escaped in 1986 and sought asylum in the United States. Shin gained American citizenship in 1989, and continued to produce films in the United States, now under his adopted name Simon S. Sheen. He and Choi eventually returned to South Korea for his final years.
People
Pantheon has 1 people classified as North Korean film directors born between 1926 and 1926. Of these 1, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased North Korean film directors include Shin Sang-ok.
