Lee Chang-dong told Deadline he wrote a screenplay after a Korean conglomerate's mass layoffs, an all-or-nothing strike, and a crackdown by the authorities, then shelved it. Documentaries had already been filmed. He asked whether he was worthy of turning that labor into a dramatic picture. He could not get a clear answer. He put the pages away. [1]
Saturday's file is that delay, not a Venice roundup. Possible Love debuts in competition this weekend with Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Cho Yeo-jeong, and Zo In-sung. Netflix will release it in cinemas on October 23 and on the streamer on November 6. The film runs just short of three hours. [1] Festival copy will file an auteur's return eight years after Burning. The invoice is a layoff he would not shoot until the camera could be written in as a suspect.
The unlock was his co-writer, Oh Jung-mi, who had worked with him on Burning. She added a documentary filmmaker. That, Lee said, let him revisit the project. [1] Mi-ok lives quietly with her husband, Ho-seok, and their young son. Ho-seok has been laid off after an incident that stunted his life and his speech at home. The family meets Ye-ji, who is filming laid-off workers, and her ultra-wealthy husband, Sang-woo. When Mi-ok agrees to be filmed, she grows close to Ye-ji. Both households shake. [1] The documentary camera is not local color. It is the question the eight-year shelf was built to hold.
"As we deal with the pain of others, we must think: are we really making sure to treat them as we would our own, candidly and honestly? Or are we just consuming it to make our films?" Lee said. He wanted that question expanded to audiences as well as to people who make pictures. [1] Festival MSM will still file a confident return. The sentence that earned the return is an accusation aimed at the person holding the camera.
He blamed the wait on what he called pathological timidity. After Burning he had promised the next film would not take as long. He did not keep the promise. People asked when he would work again. "Unless I have that conviction, I cannot make myself begin the work, no matter the external circumstances or what others around me say," he told Deadline from his office in Korea, ahead of the trip to Venice. [1] Conviction, in this telling, was not a plot. It was permission to use other people's layoffs.
Sul Kyung-gu first heard about Possible Love last March. He had met Lee at the end of 2024 and heard nothing about a new project. He was already attached elsewhere. He begged the other director to let him go. He did not ask to see the screenplay. Lee asked why he was not even interested in reading it. When Sul did, he said it smelled like a Lee Chang-dong script. [1] The actor's loyalty is not the labor story. It is evidence that the delay was the director's, not the market's.
Jung Jaeil wrote a score Lee asked to keep to a minimum. Lee has never been a fan of music that emphasizes emotion from outside the film. [1] At the end there is a tribute to Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog. The picture is not an adaptation. Lee had been offered a Dekalog feature on the tenth commandment, thou shalt not covet. He kept that commandment and put it in this story instead. The other nine, he said, are about human action. The tenth is about desire. In a capitalist world, he asked, can we live without coveting others' lives? [1]
Why Korean filmmakers keep returning to labor and capital is a question he said he is curious about himself. A few decades ago the country was among the poorest in the world after a tremendous war. Rapid development extracted a grave social cost. The aftermath, he said, is engraved in everyday life. Sul agreed: more stories will come from that conflict. [1] That is the culture file. It is not a streaming window. Netflix's dates are the distribution. The eight-year shelf is the ethics.
A man who would not film a layoff until he could put a documentary crew inside the picture is not a comeback item. He is a director who treated the right to narrate other people's pain as a question that could halt production. Venice will still file the return. The camera in Possible Love is there to be accused.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin