Director Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love", his first feature since 2018's "Burning", premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival, reuniting him with actress Jeon Do-yeon nearly 20 years after "Secret Sunshine". The film explores whether love can succeed rather than fail, inverting the "impossible love" theme Lee sees running through most romantic storytelling, and it marks his return to a project rooted in a real 2009 Korean workers' strike that he had shelved for years before finding a way to tell it.

The story follows Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon), a mask-factory worker whose husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) loses his job amid a strike, and who becomes entangled with a wealthy documentary filmmaker, Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), and her detached husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), with whom she shares a growing, unspoken attraction. Lee says the script only came together once his co-writer Oh Jung-mi suggested pairing the workers' story with a filmmaker's perspective, letting him examine questions of class, coveting and the ethics of using others' lives for art, drawing on both the biblical tenth commandment and Kieślowski's "Dekalog 10".