Using from her own
pension, Shin had begun working on her
feature directorial debut since 2007. The self-produced
independent film Passerby #3, released in 2010, was derived from her own experiences as a thirty-something woman trying break into the industry and become a filmmaker.
Passerby #3 won the JJ-Star Award at the 11th
Jeonju International Film Festival and the Best Asian-Middle Eastern Film award at the 23rd
Tokyo International Film Festival. Her next project was the
short film Circle Line, which tells the story of a middle-aged man killing time on a Seoul subway train as he tries to keep from his family the fact that he was recently
laid off.
Circle Line was invited to participate in the
65th Cannes Film Festival and won the Canal+ Prize for best short film. It screened in theaters as part of the four-film
omnibus Modern Family.
Pluto, Shin's sophomore feature, was a 2012
thriller that explores the competitive nature of the Korean education system. It premiered at the
17th Busan International Film Festival, and Shin received a special mention at the Generation 14plus Section of the
63rd Berlin International Film Festival. In 2015, her third feature
Madonna, about a nurse's aide trying to secure an
organ donation, was invited to screen in the
Un Certain Regard section of the
68th Cannes Film Festival. Her next film,
Glass Garden, is a
mystery drama film, which was released in 2017. Her fourth feature film,
Light for the Youth, is a drama film about the social issues of the youth such as those who are suffering from poor working conditions in South Korea. The film was partly inspired by the news of a 20-year old worker who was hit and killed by a train while working alone to fix a door at
Guui station in eastern
Seoul. The film's setting is a call center, which was also inspired by an incident in 2017 where a 19-year-old South Korean intern working at a call center committed suicide due to being overworked. Shin shared that working 10 years as a middle school teacher helped her empathize with the younger generation. In 2022, she wrote and directed
Hommage, a film about a middle-aged film director who had fallen in a slump due to box office failures and crosses the past and the present after receiving a project to restore a film by a fictional first-generation Korean female director who was active in the 1960s. It was invited to the International Competition section at the 34th
Tokyo International Film Festival where it had its world premiere on October 31, 2021. The film also won the Jury Award, the highest award at the 20th Florence Korean Film Festival. ==Filmography==