O Muel was born and raised on
Jeju Island, and studied Korean painting at
Jeju National University. In 1998, he became the director of the Jeju-based
culture collective Terror J and organized an annual street art festival called Flower for a Head. O is also the co-director of the Jeju Independent Film Society and acts as artistic director of the theater troupe Japari Research Center. As a
film director, O chose his native Jeju as the setting for all his films, focusing on the island's unique lifestyle, nature and people. He began his filmmaking career with two
short films in 2003,
Putting on Lipstick Thickly and
Flower for a Head. In 2009, O made his
feature directorial debut with
Nostalgia, which follows a pair of middle-aged amateur musicians who beg a once-promising rocker to be their mentor, as the latter deals with his mother's death. This was followed by
Pong Ddol (2010) about the humorous travails of a first-time filmmaker and whose title refers to the stone and metal objects attached to the end of a fishing rod, and
Wind of Island (2011) about a young mother forced to abandon her only child.
Nostalgia and
Pong Ddol received a theatrical release in 2011. It was his fourth feature film,
Jiseul (meaning "potato"), that brought O both domestic and international critical acclaim. Based on a tragic but largely forgotten historical event set during the
Jeju uprising in April 1948, O cast non-professional local actors speaking in their native
Jeju dialect to play a group of villagers who hid in a cave for 60 days, suffering cold and starvation, to escape from soldiers under
shoot-to-kill orders. Shot entirely in
black-and-white, the film had a small budget of (), part of which was raised through
crowdfunding. It premiered at the
17th Busan International Film Festival in 2012, where it received four prizes: Best Director from the Director's Guild of Korea, the Citizen Reviewers' Award, the CGV Movie Collage Award, and the NETPAC Jury Award. The
NETPAC jury praised it "for focusing on a dramatic historical event in an understated way, with stunning B/W cinematography, depicting the pathos and the psyche of the victims as well as the aggressors."
Jiseul won the
World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the
2013 Sundance Film Festival, the first Korean movie to win that prestigious award. It also won the Cyclo d'Or at the 19th
Vesoul International Film Festival of Asian Cinema and Best Film at the
1st Wildflower Film Awards.
Jiseul was released in South Korean theaters in 2013, and through positive
word of mouth after the Sundance win, it became the best-selling Korean
indie drama film with 144,602 admissions, as well as the most successful Korean film to be released on less than 100 screens (this record was later broken by
Han Gong-ju). O's fifth feature film
Golden Chariot in the Sky (2014) revolved around three brothers who go on a road trip together, with the youngest dreaming of starting a band called "Golden Chariot" with his village friends (played by real-life nine-member
ska band
Kingston Rudieska). It made its world premiere at the 49th
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and was the opening film of the 10th
Jecheon International Music & Film Festival. O has started pre-production on his next film
The Legend of a Mermaid, where a
haenyeo (Jeju-based woman diver) meets a former national
synchronized swimmer (played by
Moon Hee-kyung and
Jeon Hye-bin, respectively). It received a cash grant from the Asian Cinema Fund in 2014. == Filmography ==