Shin Sang-ok신상옥

Shin Sang-ok (신상옥, 1925 or 1926–2006), anglicized as Simon Sheen, was a South Korean film director and producer who directed 74 films in a career spanning more than five decades. He is best known in South Korea for the 1950s and 1960s, the "Golden Age" of its cinema, when he often directed two or more films a year and earned the nickname the "Prince of South Korean Cinema". Sources conflict on his birth date, so DabPop gives no exact one.¹

His company, Shin Films, produced around 300 films in the 1960s. Prince Yeonsan (연산군, 1961) won Best Film at the first Grand Bell Awards ceremony, in 1962, and he won that award three more times, for The Memorial Gate for Virtuous Women (1963), Deaf Sam-yong (1965) and Prince Daewon (1968): four of the first seven Best Film awards.¹² The Three-Day Reign (삼일천하) won Best Film at the Blue Dragon Film Awards in 1973, and To the Last Day (이 생명 다하도록) took the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 1962 Berlin Film Festival.³⁴ His 1961 film The Houseguest and My Mother was the first South Korean submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.¹

In 1978 Shin and his former wife, the actress Choi Eun-hee, were taken to North Korea, where he directed seven films before the couple escaped in 1986 and sought asylum in the United States; North Korea denied the kidnapping account. He became a US citizen in 1989, worked there as Simon S. Sheen, and returned to South Korea in his final years. He died on April 11, 2006, and later received the Gold Crown Cultural Medal, the country's top honor for an artist.¹