Lee Chang-dong is one of South Korea’s most acclaimed film-makers, renowned for austere, deeply humane, slow-burning thrillers. His work explores grief, social inequality and the way historical forces continually compromise contemporary life.
Peppermint Candy, from 1999, rewinds a broken man’s life to expose South Korea’s traumatic International Monetary Fund crisis and the military’s suppression of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980.
Oasis, from 2002, follows an ex-convict and a woman with cerebral palsy defying society through an unlikely romance. Burning, a critical sensation at Cannes in 2018, turns a love triangle into a haunting missing-person case rooted in class and obsession.
In Venice, where we meet as Possible Love, a sprawling, complex drama, competes at the city’s international film festival, the softly spoken director suggests that his real obsession is labour.
“The Korean labour movement – and not just Korea, but globally – has rapidly changed,” he says. “We live in an era where labour itself is about to disappear.
“And it’s not just about the disappearing of labour or the working man, but it’s really about how work, for human beings, depending on what kind of work you do, offers a way for us to get in touch with our sense of self.
“That’s how we relate to our self-awareness. And when you lose that, how do people go about it? How does it affect them? And in what ways does that affect all of us?”
Born in 1954 in the city of Daegu, in the notoriously right-wing North Gyeongsang province, Lee grew up in an academic family whose complicated history is underpinned by the strange contradictions within Korean society.
His father was an idealist who struggled to maintain regular employment, leaving his mother to support the family. Although descended from Korea’s noble class, Lee’s relations were committed socialists.
That friction informs the gaping class differences that he explores in Possible Love (which will go home from Venice with the Grand Jury Prize – essentially the silver medal).
“Nowadays what we used to call a class divide is almost meaningless because the divide is so vast,” the director says. “We’re not even in the same atmosphere; it’s a different stratosphere.
“The force that that kind of equity and wealth has on the rest of our lives, and that sort of transcended power, married with technology, is larger than class or nations.
“We as human beings are drawn to it, even though it affects our lives in grave ways, because it feels like it can solve all of our problems. We feel like it’s going to set us free.”
Lee began work on Possible Love in the wake of the SsangYong strike of 2009, a record-breaking 77-day occupation that began after a South Korean automotive conglomerate announced mass lay-offs and restructuring.
The subsequent industrial action, characterised by community and family get-togethers, was quashed by riot police and government forces. But the film-maker struggled to find a fictional form suited to the workers’ struggle.
More than a decade later, Oh Jung-mi, his co-screenwriter, happened upon the idea of introducing a documentary-maker – all the better to wrestle with the ethical dilemmas of ripping material from the headlines.
“As a film-maker I have continued to ask myself questions like, how do you go about treating the lives of other people, treating the pain that they go through in their lives? How honest do I want to be in telling that story? How far or close should I position myself? I think that’s really something that defines the nature of my work.”
Possible Love has a gripping plot. Mi-ok and Ho-seok are a struggling married couple raising a young son. Ho-seok has been traumatised since a violent factory strike left him injured and without work. At a colleague’s funeral they meet the fashionable Ye-ji and her entrepreneur husband, Sang-woo, a gleaming, affluent couple.
She is making a documentary about labour unrest and the treatment of factory workers. Mi-ok and Ho-seok seem like ideal subjects. As the two couples grow closer, the differences between their lives become increasingly apparent. Ye-ji’s documentary project brings her into conflict with the realities of the people she claims to represent.
Mi-ok becomes increasingly drawn into the privileged world of her new acquaintances. Over one fancy dinner she dreamily gazes at her wealthy benefactors and tells Sang-woo that he reminds her of Steve Jobs. (He couldn’t look less like the late Apple mogul.) Her romanticisation of megawealth forms a chilling theme.
“Privilege and wealth married with technology is why that character is drawn to Steve Jobs,” Lee says. “We as human beings are drawn to these people, even though they affect our lives in grave ways. We feel they can solve all of our problems.”
Lee sees this as a sinister delusion. We are flirting with very modern forms of disaster.
“When technological innovation is combined with wealth it can sometimes completely take our lives away and lead to us losing our sense of self.”
The increasingly queasy courtship between the mismatched couples ultimately leads to a nerve-racking series of confrontations at Sang-woo’s secluded beach house.
“There is a very violent crackdown from the authorities in the film,” Lee says. “But I don’t think it is only about that violence. I think the character of Sang-woo, the affluent husband, is more dangerous. I think the power of equity presents itself as being very kind and being very humane. But that violence of wealth and equity – that you can’t really see overtly – can be even more than physical violence.”
Possible Love was initially conceived as part of Maciej Musial’s ambitious project to remake all 10 episodes of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s classic TV series Dekalog as feature films.
Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, transports the Polish master’s A Short Film About Love to Paris in the aftermath of the 2015 attacks.
Lee visually references A Short Film About Killing in the final, confrontational act of Possible Love, during which the working-class couple are whisked away to a luxury beachside house. No amount of wining and dining can prevent the tensions that ensue. But the connections with Kieslowski’s meditations on the Ten Commandments remain loose.
“I liked Dekalog, and I liked Kieslowski,” Lee says. “I wanted to participate. And I decided that my commandment of choice was the last one, which is ‘thou shalt not covet.’ It’s quite different from the other nine. Those commandments are about human action. However, ‘thou shalt not covet’ is about the matters of the human heart.
“And while this story of Possible Love was already written before the Dekalog suggestion came, I knew I could connect the story to the last commandment. In this capitalist society that we live in, in a time when the value of labour can be so easily taken away, is it truly possible for us not to covet what others have?”
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Korean cinema became a cult brand, associated with the Asia Extreme movement, as exemplified by such controversy-courting hits as The Isle, Oldboy and A Tale of Two Sisters.
In recent years it has escaped the festival circuit and genre ghetto to become an essential global cinema.
Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite made history by winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and four Academy Awards, including for best picture, while Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave have furthered his reputation as one of the 21st century’s more formidable auteurs. Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game extended Korea’s cultural reach worldwide, while Lee’s own Burning cemented his reputation for enigmatic, psychologically rich dramas.
Lee’s international successes and his term as South Korea’s minister of culture in 2003-4 have not made financing any easier in his native country. From 2007 until 2016 Lee was blacklisted by the government and denied subsidies. The much-lauded Burning should have brought financiers calling. Ultimately, Netflix came to the rescue. The streaming service, the director notes, is both a new challenge to the industry and part of that industry.
“In Korea we are seeing many successful signs across different indices that Korean films are doing very well,” Lee says. “There are wonderful films that were loved by global audiences, like Parasite. But, quite paradoxically, the theatres have been very significantly hit by Covid and the growth of streaming services. When I was trying to get the film financed, during the first half of 2025, the Korean cinema industry was at its weakest state.”
His partnership with the world’s weightiest streaming giant seems to have paid off.
“Netflix, from the very beginning, has always wanted to work with me,” he says. “They were patient. They waited through the process of trying to get Possible Love financed. And they gave me absolute creative freedom.”
Possible Love is on Netflix from Friday, November 6th
Source: The Irish Times · Tara Brady
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