At Yale, with exposure to world cinema in his senior year, he dropped his plans for medical school to pursue film-making.

[8] Chung's directorial debut was Munyurangabo, a movie set in Rwanda, a collaboration with students at an international relief base in Kigali.

The movie was an opportunity to present the contemporary reality of Rwanda and to provide his students with practical film training.

It stars Amanda Plummer, Will Patton, and Burt Young and was produced by Eugene Suen and Samuel Gray Anderson.

Produced by Chung, Anderson, John Kwezi, and Eugene Suen, the film focuses on the family relations and history of a genocide survivor in modern-day Rwanda.

Chung wrote the film in the summer of 2018, by which time he was considering retiring from film-making and accepted a teaching job at the University of Utah's Asia Campus in Incheon.

"[16] In 2020, it was initially announced that Chung would direct and rewrite the live-action adaptation of the anime film Your Name, replacing Marc Webb as director.

[17] Also in 2020, it was announced he was developing a romance film set in New York and Hong Kong, produced by Plan B and MGM.