Unlike most of his peers who studied overseas, CHOI Yeong-hwan, born in 1971, learned his trade in Korea while working on the set. He debuted his film career when he joined the filming crew of <A Single Spark> in 1995. As a director of photography, he first drew attention in 2000 for his use of digital cameras in the shorts <Coming Out>, directed by KIM Jee-woon, and <Dachimawa Lee>, from RYOO Seung-wan. His first cinematography work on a feature film came t...More

Unlike most of his peers who studied overseas, CHOI Yeong-hwan, born in 1971, learned his trade in Korea while working on the set. He debuted his film career when he joined the filming crew of <A Single Spark> in 1995. As a director of photography, he first drew attention in 2000 for his use of digital cameras in the shorts <Coming Out>, directed by KIM Jee-woon, and <Dachimawa Lee>, from RYOO Seung-wan. His first cinematography work on a feature film came the following year with JEONG Jae-eun’s critically acclaimed coming-of-age film <Take Care Of My Cat> (2001), and later that year he worked again with RYOO on <No Blood No Tears> (2001). When he filmed CHOI Dong-hoon’s heist film <The Big Swindle> (2004), which was comprised mostly of moving shots, he notably suggested to the director that they depict the narrated flashbacks in cold colors instead of the commonly used sepia tint, which itself was used for the rest of the film, so as to trick the viewers into taking seriously these unreliable accounts. Having thus found his niche, he has since worked on a large number of thrillers such as <Blood Rain> (2004), <Princess Aurora> (2005), <7 Days> (2007) and <Bestseller> (2010). It is however for his long collaborations with CHOI Dong-hoon and RYOO Seung-wan that he is best known, his eye-catching style finding a natural home in the glossy and pulpy films of these two directors. In the former’s gambling film <Tazza: The Big Swindle (2004), CHOI displayed elaborate camera movements combining pans, dollies, and zooms while keeping the focus on rhythm and tempo, which led him to win the Blue Dragon Film Award for Best Cinematography. When RYOO turned his retro spy short film <Dachimawa Lee> into a long feature in 2007, he called again upon CHOI to capture the “tackiness” of Korean actioners of the 70s through the visual tics of the time. His style thrived again in the smash hit heist flick <The Thieves> (2012) and helped pull in 12.9 million viewers upon its release. He was also highly praised for his use of a visual style evoking Cold War-era thrillers in RYOO’s <The Berlin File> (2012), earning him prizes at the Blue Dragon Film Awards and the Grand Bell Awards. He then tackled the epic melodrama <Ode to My Father> (2014), which notably involved challenging war scenes such as the massive amphibious evacuation of civilians from Hungnam during the Korean War. In 2014, he was reunited with RYOO for his action crime hit <Veteran>. He later worked on one of Korea’s first disaster films, <Pandora> (2016).Less