Lee Chang-dong Returns to Venice With 'Possible Love' — SkimNews
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- "Possible Love" premiered in Venice competition as Lee Chang-dong's first feature since "Burning" (2018), the product of nearly two decades of development that began with a fictional treatment of a 2009 mass layoff and 70-day strike — a project Lee shelved because he could not settle whether fictionalizing real workers' pain was justified
- Co-writer Oh Jung-mi suggested pairing the workers' story with a filmmaker's story, which Lee said let him be "more honest in the storytelling" by locating it adjacent to his own experience and posing the question of whether filmmakers are "using [other people's lives] for our own purposes"
- The film follows Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), a mask factory worker whose husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) was laid off, intersecting with a wealthy filmmaker couple — Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), working with Lee for the first time — making a documentary about laid-off workers
- Jeon Do-yeon reunites with Lee nearly 20 years after "Secret Sunshine" and revised her reading of Mi-ok's pull toward Sang-woo from desire to "curiosity" once shooting began; she said the role arrived at a career moment when she has grown "frustrated" watching commercial appeal crowd out character work in Korean film
- Sul Kyung-gu reunites with Lee 24 years after "Oasis," which won Lee Venice's best director prize in 2002, and agreed to the project before reading the script, calling Lee's name "complete trust" and still naming "Peppermint Candy" as his most representative role
- Lee traces the film's question to the 10th commandment ("thou shalt not covet") and Kieślowski's "Dekalog 10," arguing that in today's capitalism class is "no longer just class" and that resistance to coveting is barely possible — a critique that extends to Ye-ji's desire to "claim other people's lives" for her documentary
- "Possible Love" opens theatrically on Oct. 23 after Toronto, Busan and London festival screenings, and streams on Netflix starting Nov. 6
Why it matters: The film marks Lee's first feature in seven years, reuniting three figures from a pre-Bong Joon-ho era of Korean cinema on a project that took roughly two decades to finish — and its Nov. 6 Netflix streaming date gives the platform a Venice-tested auteur title ahead of awards season.
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