‘Possible Love’ wins Venice as Lee Chang-dong confronts pain beyond cinema’s genre escape routes

While Korean cinema's biggest international successes in recent years have come from directors reworking Hollywood genre formulas, Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" won Korea's first Grand Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival on Saturday — a film with no genre at all.

The Grand Jury Prize is officially considered the festival's second-highest award behind the Golden Lion.

Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Yeon Sang-ho, Na Hong-jin, Ryoo Seung-wan, Yoon Jong-bin and Kim Jee-woon have all built international reputations reinterpreting Hollywood-style genre filmmaking in a distinctly Korean register.

Lee's film instead confronts an era in which immigration and AI have made mass layoffs commonplace, doing so with unflinching realism and without recourse to black comedy, thriller devices or science-fiction imagination.

Foreign press coverage has zeroed in on this same point.

Time Out described "Possible Love" as forming — together with Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" (2019) and Park Chan-wook's "No Other Choice" (2025) — a “bleak triptych of modern fables" about class stratification in contemporary society.

IONCinema wrote, "'Possible Love' feels like it's mashing up the central families of Bong Joon-ho's 'Parasite' and Park Chan-wook's 'No Other Choice' and letting them feed off one another. But there is no trace of genre here."

In "Possible Love," Mi-ok, played by Jeon Do-yeon, whose husband, Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, has lost his job and who has a 10-year-old son, grows close over the course of a summer to Ye-ji, played by Cho Yeo-jeong, a documentary director covering laid-off workers.

But unlike Ye-ji, who can walk away from her "poverty tourism" whenever she likes, Mi-ok's efforts to make herself worthy of her new friend are simply painful to watch.

TIME wrote of the film, "Sometimes it's a relief when a movie captures undercurrents of anxiety that, in our daily lives, we find difficult to put into words."

Lee, who debuted as a novelist before turning to film, has risen to the ranks of world cinema's great auteurs on the strength of just seven features made over 30 years since his 1997 directorial debut, "Green Fish."

In 2002, veteran auteur Im Kwon-taek's "Chihwaseon" won him the directing prize at the Cannes Film Festival and helped lay the groundwork for Korean cinema's international recognition — the culmination of a body of work steeped in classical Korean aesthetics.

That same year, Lee’s "Oasis" garnered two awards in Venice: the Silver Lion for best director for Lee and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best emerging actor for Moon So-ri.

Where Im's film reflected a distinctly classical sensibility, Lee's was recognized for its more contemporary concern.

Time Out described "Oasis" as posing questions about the nature of desire through the relationship between two marginalized figures: a man with cerebral palsy and a former convict.

"I think my identity as a writer who was active during the period when Gwangju in 1980 and oppressive political, social and economic problems weighed heavily on society still influences me today," Lee said at a press conference for his own retrospective at the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2022. "I want to leave a question lingering in the audience for as long as possible."

In May 1980, the military government of Chun Doo Hwan violently suppressed a pro-democracy uprising in the southwestern city of Gwangju, killing an estimated 200 or more civilians in what is now known as the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement.

Lee's films have consistently portrayed the living, breathing pain of characters caught in the binds of the real world.

In "Peppermint Candy" (1999), a man, played by Sul, whose soul is broken after being deployed as a soldier during the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement, is driven to the brink by the 1997 IMF financial crisis. "Secret Sunshine" (2007) offered a philosophical treatment of the religious metaphors of salvation and forgiveness, while in "Poetry" (2010), a grandmother aspiring to write poetry despairs over the reality that her grandson took part in a gang rape — a truth she cannot bring herself to put into verse.

"Burning" (2018), which won the Fipresci Prize and the Vulcan Award at Cannes, portrayed a poor young man aspiring to be a novelist who struggles to write under the invisible grip of neoliberalism.

Lee's directing style, too, has been thoroughly committed to realism. "Secret Sunshine" originally ended with Shin-ae, played by Jeon, wading into a reservoir in her underwear in the early-winter cold and screaming up at the sky, but the scene was cut during editing for being "too cinematic." The ending was rewritten and reshot, resulting in the film's current close-up of a patch of sunlit ground.

"Possible Love" carries Lee's own reflection, as a creator, on his history of depicting other people's pain. He spent a long time developing the project after encountering the plight of laid-off workers, but at one point, he shelved it at the preproduction stage, believing it would offer nothing more than a documentary could.

After the Covid-19 pandemic brought theaters to a halt, he completed the film as one that seeks a process of moving toward "healing" together, rather than "consuming" suffering.

At a press conference before leaving for Venice, Lee laid out his aims for the film: "In an age when love seems impossible, I wanted the film to ask what kind of love is still possible, and what we need to do to make love possible."

Following Venice, "Possible Love" has been invited to film festivals at home and abroad, including in Toronto, New York, San Sebastián, Vancouver, Zurich, London and Busan. It has also been selected as Korea's submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards, to take place next March. The film opens in domestic theaters on Sept. 23, before its global release on Netflix on Nov. 6.

BY NA WON-JEONG, JEONG EUN-HYE [[email protected]]