Park Jong-won is a South Korean director and screenwriter. At the beginning of his career, he Jong-won had strength in adapting well-known literary works on film. Guro Arirang (1989), based on a novel of the same name by Lee Moon-youl, was an exposé into the poor working conditions of many workers in the 1980s. The movie hit the screens, however, as a mutilated version due to government censorship much to the dismay of many.
Park's next work, Our Twisted Hero (1992), was also a film adaptation of a Lee Moon-youl novel. This time, he takes a more metaphorical approach in delivering the message of the novel. One of the movie's main characters, a boy with almost absolute power in a rural school, was an analogy to the many dictators of modern Korean history. Rather than employing any particular aesthetic style, Park prefers conveying the message of his movies straightforward. He was a professor at the School of Film, TV & Multimedia in Korea National University of Arts and now the school's chancellor.
