Kim Yoo-jin said he began his filmmaking career to "voice social opinion," notably in Only Because You Are a Woman (1990), where Won Mi-kyung played a raped housewife who faces doubt and victim blaming from her family, neighbors and inside the courtroom.
Kim then cast Park Shin-yang and Jeon Do-yeon in A Promise, a melodrama about the romance between a gangster and a doctor; it drew critical acclaim for its actors and became the top-grossing Korean film of 1998.
[2] In 2003, Jung Jin-young and Yang Dong-geun played detectives determined to find a young killer and his gang in Kim's gritty cop drama Wild Card.
[3] Kim took on a more ambitious project for his eighth feature film, which had a ₩10 billion budget and took nearly six years to produce: period action blockbuster The Divine Weapon.
[4][5][6] Starring Jung Jae-young, Ahn Sung-ki and Han Eun-jung, the Korean title Singijeon refers to a multi-launch fire arrow rocket system, a sophisticated military weapon that was secretly developed in the Joseon era during King Sejong's reign to fight off foreign invasion.