After graduating from
Dongguk University's Graduate School of Film Arts, Kim Han-min gained accolades for two of his
short films -
Sunflower Blues which screened at the
Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival as well as the New York Independent Film Festival; and
Three Hungry Brothers which received awards at the Mise-en-scene Genre Film Festival, the Asiana International Short Film Festival, and the Seoul Digital Film Festival. In 2007 he made his feature directorial debut with the mystery-thriller
Paradise Murdered starring
Park Hae-il,
Park Sol-mi and
Sung Ji-ru. A fictionalized account of a murder that took place on a secluded island in the 1980s involving rational and irrational horrors, the film sold over 2 million tickets nationwide. In his second feature, Kim shifted his setting to the big city, with
blackmail thriller
Handphone (2009) revolving around every urbanite's essential hardware, the cell phone. Starring
Uhm Tae-woong and
Park Yong-woo, it fell short of both the commercial and critical successes of his first film. Set during the
second Manchu invasion of 1636, Kim's third film
War of the Arrows (2011) combined well-choreographed combat sequences and special effects, fast pacing, a tense plot and the thrill of the chase to tell the story of a master archer and his quest to rescue his sister from
Qing Dynasty soldiers. The period action film unexpectedly drew an audience of 7.46 million, making it the highest grossing Korean film of 2011. It also won recognition at the
Grand Bell Awards and the
Blue Dragon Film Awards, notably for its lead actors Park Hae-il,
Ryu Seung-ryong and
Moon Chae-won. Kim's follow-up in 2014 was another period epic,
Battle of Myeongryang, Whirlwind Sea (released internationally as
The Admiral: Roaring Currents), which depicted the
legendary sea battle between 12 vessels of the Korean navy led by the most admired military figure in Korea, General
Yi Sun-sin (played by
Choi Min-sik), and 330 invading Japanese ships, which are eventually defeated. Given the disparity in numbers, the battle is regarded as one of Yi's most remarkable victories. It became the
all-time most successful film in South Korean box office history, the first ever to reach 15 million admissions and the first local film to gross more than . To commemorate Yi's 407th birth anniversary in 2015, Kim and Jung Se-kyu co-directed
Roaring Currents: The Road of the Admiral, a
documentary prequel to
The Admiral: Roaring Currents in which cast members of the 2014 film retraced the 450-kilometer path that the admiral walked in preparation for the Battle of Myeongnyang, based on the war diary that Yi wrote. Beginning with 2014 film,
The Admiral: Roaring Currents, Kim created
Yi Sun-sin trilogy, based on three major naval battles led by Admiral Yi Sun-sin. The second film
Hansan: Rising Dragon, based on
Battle of Hansan Island which took place 5 years before Battle of Myeongnyang depicted in
The Admiral, was released in 2022.
Park Hae-il portrayed Admiral Yi in the film. Kim's follow-up to
Noryang: Deadly Sea (2023) was first announced in October 2024 during the "
Plus M X
SLL Night" event held at the
29th Busan International Film Festival.
Park Bo-gum who had a role in Kim's
The Admiral: Roaring Currents (2014), is set to lead the film titled
The Sword: Rebirth of the Red Wolf which is set in
Goguryeo. Filming began in January 2026 with a planned 2027 release. ==Filmography==