Lee Chang-dong, Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu on Class, Desire and Reunion in Venice Competition Drama ‘Possible Love’

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Korean director Lee Chang-dong has returned to the Venice Film Festival competition with 'Possible Love', his first feature since 2018's 'Burning' and a work that deliberately inverts the doomed-romance template running through much of his earlier output. Where his previous films tend to dwell on love thwarted by class, circumstance or fate, Lee has said he wanted this one to ask whether a love that survives those obstacles is possible at all. The film stars Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu, both veterans of Lee's earlier work, alongside Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong, who are collaborating with the director for the first time.

The story centres on Mi-ok, a mask-factory worker played by Jeon Do-yeon, and her husband Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, a heavy-industry worker who has recently lost his job following a failed strike. A funeral for a former colleague — one of several suicides that followed the factory's mass redundancies — brings the couple into the orbit of Ye-ji, a documentary filmmaker played by Cho Yeo-jeong who is gathering testimony from laid-off workers, and her husband Sang-woo, a wealthy, self-assured businessman played by Zo In-sung. As Mi-ok agrees to take part in Ye-ji's documentary, an easy rapport develops between the two women, while a less easily defined pull draws her towards Sang-woo. The widening contact between the two households, one shaped by daily financial struggle and the other insulated by money, gradually destabilises both marriages.

The mass layoffs depicted in the film draw on a real 2009 dispute at a major Korean company, which triggered a 70-day strike and a violent crackdown by the authorities. Lee began work on a fictionalised account not long afterwards but abandoned it, unable to resolve his doubts about whether recasting real workers' suffering as fiction, rather than documentary, would serve them, his audience or the medium itself. The project was revived only when his 'Burning' co-writer, Oh Jung-mi, proposed folding in a second strand about a filmmaker, giving Lee a more oblique, personal route into the material and a way of interrogating his own right to tell other people's stories — a concern he has said dates back to his years as a novelist. One outlet notes that the film was originally conceived as part of an international directors' series reworking Krzysztof Kieslowski's 'Dekalog', tied loosely to the commandment against covetousness, though the finished film departs almost entirely from that source. It is due to open in limited theatrical release in Korea in October ahead of its US release and international streaming on Netflix, which financed the production, and has already been chosen as South Korea's submission for the Academy Awards' Best International Feature category.

Reaction on the Lido has been strongly positive, with critics repeatedly singling out the performances, particularly Jeon Do-yeon's, and Lee's ability to weave social critique of Korean labour conditions and class division into an intimate marital drama without either register overwhelming the other. Several reviews awarded high scores and used terms such as 'transfixing', 'quietly colossal' and a 'stunner', while trade press coverage highlighted the film's warmth and generosity of tone alongside its unflinching look at economic precarity, suggesting it has emerged as one of the festival's best-received titles so far.

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