Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love Wins Venice Prize, Heads to Oscars — SkimNews
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- Lee Chang-dong directed Possible Love, a film inspired by the 2009 Ssangyong Motors strike, which depicted a 77-day worker occupation broken up by riot police and led to suicides and long-term trauma among laborers.
- Lee Chang-dong delayed the project for over a decade, questioning whether he was worthy to tell the story of the Ssangyong workers and how to ethically represent their pain without exploiting it.
- Lee Chang-dong and co-writer Oh Jung-mi developed multiple scripts, including a post-apocalyptic version, before settling on a structure centered on a documentary filmmaker, embedding the film’s own ethical tensions into the narrative.
- Possible Love won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and has been selected as South Korea’s official submission for the Best International Feature Oscar.
- Netflix funded Possible Love after Lee struggled to secure domestic financing due to the Korean film industry’s structural crisis from pandemic losses and streaming competition, and will release it globally on November 6.
- Lee Chang-dong likened his reliance on Netflix funding to his character Ye-ji’s marriage to a wealthy financier, describing filmmakers as dependent on capital while striving to preserve artistic independence.
Why it matters: Filmmakers like Lee Chang-dong now depend on global capital—such as Netflix—to tell locally rooted stories of labor and inequality, creating a paradox where critiques of capital are enabled by it. This shifts creative control and access, favoring platforms over domestic studios in shaping national cinema.
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