[2] As owner and president of Sponge Entertainment, he produced and invested in numerous Korean arthouse films, such as Jang Hoon's Rough Cut, Lee Yoon-ki's My Dear Enemy, Kim Ki-duk's Dream, and E J-yong's Actresses.
[1] In 2010, Cho made his directorial debut with Second Half starring Ryu Seung-soo and Esom, about a beleaguered film producer who meets a waitress in a seaside town and suspects she may be his daughter from a long-ago one-night stand.
(2012) is about a famous actress (played by Choi Yoon-so) who's just been publicly dumped by a comedian and banned by her agency from dating, and an unknown indie musician rejected by a matchmaking service who falls for her onscreen while composing the soundtrack for her film.
[4] Also released in 2012, Cho's third film The Winter of the Year Was Warm focuses on a Seoul-based film producer/director who's fond of the laidback atmosphere in the coastal city of Gangneung, and a nurse who lives in Gangneung but yearns for the cultural life of Seoul; after meeting through a common friend, they each agree to set aside one room in their respective apartments for the other to stay at on weekends, but in sharing their homes with each other, they eventually start to develop a strange sort of in absentia intimacy.
[8] In a departure from his previous films which blended finely-observed realism and light romance, Cho's Planck Constant (2015) contained more surrealistic and fantasy elements, with Kim Jae-wook playing a man who gets his hair cut 1 millimeter a day, while writing a screenplay in his head.