Jeong Jae-eun attended and was one of the first graduates of the School of Film, TV and Multimedia of the Korea National University of Arts. Early in her career she wrote and directed several short films, notably Yu-jin's Secret Codes which won the Grand Prix at the KNUA Graduation Film Festival and the Women's Film Festival in Seoulin 1999. Jeong's first feature film was Take Care of My Cat, a story of friendship and growth among five young women in their twenties. It swept numerous awards at international film festivals, including the NETPAC Award and New Currents Award Special Mention at the Pusan International Film Festival, the FIPRESCI Prize at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, a KNF Award Special Mention at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Best Picture award at the Cinema Jove Valencia International Film Festival, among others. Jeong also won Best New Director at the 2002 Korean Film Awards. In 2003 Jeong made a short titled The Man with an Affair which was included in If You Were Me, an omnibus project for human rights. Her second feature was The Aggressives, a film about urban Seoulite youngsters passionate about inline skating, which was also invited to the Generation section of the Berlinale. She was an adjunct professor at Sungkyunkwan University's School of Film, Television and Multimedia from 2007 to 2009. Another short Hakim & Barchin, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in 2010, followed. In 2009, Jeong pursued a new interest in documentary filmmaking, centering on urban, environmental, and architectural themes. Talking Architect, about the last few years of celebrated maverick Korean architectChung Guyon was her first feature-length documentary. For independent documentaries of this type, a box office score of 10,000 admissions is usually considered to be a major success. However Talking Architect rode positive word-of-mouth to sell a total of 36,500 tickets since its March 8 release. Jeong next shot a second architecture-themed documentary, City: Hall, an in-depth look at the creative, political and bureaucratic pressures that affected the controversial design and renovation of Seoul's new City Hall.
