Byun Young-joo facts for kids

Byun Young-joo (born December 20, 1966) is a South Korean film director. Her films explore issues of women's rights and human rights.

Career

Byun Young-joo graduated with a law degree from Ewha Womans University and did her graduate studies at the Department of Theater and Film at Chung-Ang University.

She is a founding member of the women's feminist film collective "Bariteo," which was established in 1989. She worked as a cinematographer on Even Little Grass Has Its Own Name (Kim So-young, 1989), a short film about gender discrimination at work, and My Children (Doe Sung-hee, 1990), a documentary film about childcare in a poor neighborhood.

In Documentary of Yang Joo-nam (1998), Byun chose the director/editor (Sweet Dream: Lullaby of Death, A Mother's Love) as her subject. Yang was active in Korean cinema in the late 1930s until the late 1960s, but had lived in seclusion since then.

She then produced the documentary Koryu: Southern Women, South Korea (Kim So-young, 2001), which deals with feminine modes of expression and existence in both pre-modern and modern Korea, to construct a complex and multiple portrait of women's lives as diasporic, or "koryu": temporary living in an alien land - women living in man's land. Byun was also credited as one of the cinematographers for the documentary Repatriation (Kim Dong-won, 2004), which follows two North Korean political prisoners and their decade-long struggle to return home after their release.

Her sophomore feature effort Flying Boys (2004) is a coming-of-age romance that also portrays the struggles of the lower classes. Byun had her young actors take about two months of ballet classes so they could grasp the basics of the form.

Commissioned as part of Ten Ten, the 10th anniversary project of the International Women's Film Festival in Seoul, her documentary short film The Wise Way to Remember the 20th Century (2008) is a meditation on the writings of Park Wan-suh and her legacy on the 20th century, specifically its impact on Byun as a filmmaker and other women artists of the present generation.

Her most recent film Helpless (2012) is based on the Japanese novel All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe, which pivots around a young woman who suddenly disappears just a few weeks before her wedding, but also talks about contemporary problems such as private loans, bankruptcy and credit rating. Byun won Best Director at the 2012 Baeksang Arts Awards and Women in Film Korea Awards, and at 2.4 million tickets sold, Helpless is her biggest box-office hit yet.

Filmography

• Helpless (2012)
• The Wise Way to Remember the 20th Century (documentary short, 2008)
• Flying Boys (2004)
• Ardor (2002)
• My Own Breathing (documentary, 1999)
• Documentary of Yang Joo-nam (documentary, 1998)
• Habitual Sadness (documentary, 1997)
• The Murmuring (documentary, 1995)
• Women Being in Asia (documentary, 1993)

Awards

• 2012 Women in Film Korea Awards: Woman Filmmaker of the Year (Helpless)
• 2012 Baeksang Arts Awards: Best Director (Helpless)
• 1999 Pusan International Film Festival: Woonpa Fund (My Own Breathing)
• 1998 Taiwan International Documentary Festival: Merit Prize (Habitual Sadness)
• 1996 Korean Film Critics Association: Film Critics Special Award (The Murmuring)
• 1995 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival: Shinsuke Ogawa Award (The Murmuring)