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Kwak Kyung-taek

South Korean film director

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 18, 2025
Entity authorityQ2315679 ↗
Source-derived summary

Kwak Kyung-taek (Korean: 곽경택; born 23 May 1966) is a South Korean film director best known for his 2001 record-breaking film Friend.

Career

Friend, a drama where conflicting criminal alliances turn old friends into enemies, set a new Korean box office record with an audience of 8 million, and he received the Holden Award for the Best Script at the 2001 Torino Film Festival. In 2003, he received an award at the Philadelphia Film Festival for the boxing drama film Champion. His 2005 action film Typhoon, however, was a commercial failure.

Filmography as director

Yeongchang Story (1995, short film)

3pm Bathhouse Paradise (1997)

Dr. K (1999) Dr.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Kwak Kyung-taek” as south Korean film director. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1966, 2001, 2003, 2005—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1966-05-23. The account is most persuasive where Kwak, Kyung-taek and South can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as south Korean film director. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2315679. VIAF identifies the subject as 439144928063654341377. The Library of Congress control number is no2011141497. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966, 2001, 2003 and 2005.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Kwak Kyung-taek”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Kwak Kyung-taek primary sources, Kwak Kyung-taek archive and Kwak research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Kwak Kyung-taek”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Kwak Kyung-taek” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.