Sixty Films In, Still Someone You'd Have to Be Told About ¹

Two acting prizes, a filmography past sixty titles, and, outside a small circle of festival programmers, almost no name recognition at all.

Park Jong-hwan has been acting professionally since the early 2000s. By the time he appeared in Conversation (the film reviewed elsewhere in this issue), his own filmography already ran past sixty features and a handful of television credits, alongside a parallel career on stage. None of that has added up to the kind of name recognition the volume might suggest, which is closer to the ordinary condition of a working character actor than an exception to it.

He has, in fact, been recognised twice by people whose job is watching Korean independent film closely: the Actor of the Year prize at the 22nd Busan International Film Festival in 2017, for the film Bamchigi, and Best Actor at the 23rd Busan Film Critics Association Awards in 2023, for Windswept (절해고도). Neither prize travelled far outside Korea's own festival press.

Conversation is built almost entirely out of long, uninterrupted takes: entire scenes played in one continuous shot, some running past ten minutes, with no cuts to hide a fumbled line or a prop running low. In a joint interview with his co-star Jo Eun-ji, published in the film magazine Cine21, Park Jong-hwan described one such scene, set around a shared meal, where the number of takes started to outpace the number of eggs on the table: "There were about eight eggs. As we went further into takes, I got worried we'd run out — so at first I ate one whole egg per take, and later we started carefully splitting them in half."² It is a small, specific detail, and it is the kind of thing that only surfaces when a scene has actually been shot enough times for someone to start doing the arithmetic.

Of his character, a blunt, temperature-shifting presence named Seung-jin, he said in the same interview: "the way he came across in the dialogue was so clear that I just acted it the way the script made me feel it," a plain description of a role built almost entirely out of what the lines themselves gave him, rather than anything imposed from outside.²

None of this is an origin story exactly, and Park Jong-hwan is not new. By the time Conversation premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in 2021, he already had a Busan festival prize and a substantial career behind him. What this magazine exists to notice is closer to the opposite of an origin story: a long, ordinary accumulation of work that, sixty-odd films in, still requires an introduction outside a fairly small circle of people who follow Korean independent film closely.

For the film, read our piece on Conversation. For the school where he studied film before any of this, read the companion piece on Seoul Institute of the Arts.

1. ¹ SAMPLE COPY: preview build, not a published piece. Park Jong-hwan is a real actor. This piece is drawn from the public sources listed below. It has not been fact-checked or legal-reviewed, no interview was conducted for it, and the subject has not been contacted.
2. ² Quotations translated from a joint interview with Park Jong-hwan and Jo Eun-ji, Cine21, on the making of Conversation (two-part feature, "10여분간의 원숏 촬영"). Career and award details cross-checked between Cine21's person database (person_id 91636) and Korean Wikipedia's actor filmography entry.

NAME

Park Jong-hwan · 박종환

BASED IN

Seoul

APPEARED IN

Issue Three