Hemin Park grew up in Seoul, spent over five years working a desk job, then left it all and moved to New York. That was when she started making films.
Her short film screenplay A Dog Doll won the Grand Prize at the New York Asian Film Awards.
She works out of what she knows. Her films follow women who feel trapped by the shape of their lives, and immigrants who arrive somewhere new too late to pretend it is easy. Before any of this, she worked in Koreatown in Manhattan and saw parts of the city that most people do not see. Those years became the material.
She has published three books. She loves the films of Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and Hong Sang-soo.
Hemin has spent most of her life going under through conversation and coming back up through it too. She believes life is mostly made of talk: with yourself, with others. She wants to use film to crack that open a little wider. She does not yet know what form that will take, so she writes something every day on social media and has kept a diary on her website for nearly five years.
She also writes, shoots, directs, and edits 3 Korean American Women, a one-minute mini-drama series she makes entirely alone. It has been watched over two million times.
