160 Years of Making… Movie Magic: Hong Sang-soo

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alums have been making history over the last 16 decades. In our “160 Years of Making” series, we’re celebrating the people who shaped the School, Chicago, and the art world at large. Watch for more profiles as we honor this historic anniversary.

When Hong Sang-soo (MFA 1989) enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in the 1980s, he was still years away from the meditative, dialogue-driven films that would make him one of the most acclaimed directors in contemporary cinema. Today, the South Korean filmmaker has written and directed more than 30 features—often completing two or three in a single year—and has become a fixture at the world's most prestigious festivals.

Sang-soo's path to filmmaking began at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, where he studied theater before moving to the United States. He earned a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, then came to Chicago for his MFA in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at SAIC. It was here that Sang-soo developed the spare, observational style—long takes, structural repetition, and loose, naturalistic dialogue—that would define his work and draw comparisons to Éric Rohmer and Yasujirō Ozu.

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Sang-soo made his directorial debut in 1996 with The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, which won the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. The film interweaves four linear vignettes, each centered on a different character, to portray a group of Seoulites drifting through affairs, self-deception, and quiet desperation in the mid-1990s. Sang-soo developed this structure by assigning students at the Korean Academy of Film Arts to each script a single character's day, then stitching the results together. Shot with a coldness that unsettled some domestic audiences, it was hailed by critics as a landmark of Korean cinema's "New Realism" and marked the screen debut of future star Song Kang-ho. 

Since then, the honors have piled up: the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes, three Silver Bears from the Berlin International Film Festival—including two Grand Jury Prizes—a Golden Leopard from Locarno, and dozens of other festival awards spanning three decades.

Sang-soo's SAIC education came at a formative moment, as the School's interdisciplinary, experimental ethos gave him room to develop a voice distinct from mainstream Korean cinema of the era. His success has, in turn, helped put SAIC's film program on the map internationally, and he remains one of the School's most celebrated alums.

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As SAIC marks 160 years of educating artists, Sang-soo's career stands as proof of the lasting influence of the School's risk-taking approach to art-making—training that continues to shape how graduates like Sang-soo reimagine their art form, one long take at a time.