Lee Chang-dong returns to filmmaking at Venice as Bangladeshi film bows
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New details have emerged on Lee Chang-dong's long-awaited comeback film, Possible Love, which premiered in Competition at the Venice Film Festival alongside Rubaiyat Hossain's The Difficult Bride, the first Bangladeshi film selected for the festival's Horizons section. The South Korean director, who has not made a feature since 2018's Burning, told Deadline his eight-year absence stemmed from "pathological timidity" and doubts over whether he was the right person to tell a story about labour rights, having initially shelved the project before revisiting it with co-writer Oh Jung-mi.
Possible Love, running just under three hours, stars Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu as a married couple whose lives become entangled with a documentary filmmaker (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her wealthy husband (Zo In-sung) after the husband loses his job. The film, which also pays tribute to Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog, will be released in cinemas by Netflix on 23 October before streaming from 6 November; both it and Hossain's supernatural feminist drama are set for further screenings at the Toronto festival.
- Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love premieres at Venice after 8-year hiatus
- Director cites self-doubt over tackling labour rights subject matter
- Netflix releases film in cinemas 23 October, streaming from 6 November
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Lee Chang-dong is a South Korean film director best known for acclaimed dramas such as Poetry and Burning, the latter released in 2018. He has not made a feature film since then, and his new project, Possible Love, is being seen as a long-awaited comeback. It stars established Korean actors Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu, and centres on a married couple whose lives become entangled with another couple after a job loss, touching on themes of labour and class.
The film has premiered in Competition at the Venice Film Festival, one of the world's most prestigious cinema events, where new works are judged for major awards. Alongside it, The Difficult Bride by Bangladeshi director Rubaiyat Hossain is notable for being the first Bangladeshi film ever selected for Venice's Horizons section, which showcases new trends in world cinema. Its inclusion marks a rare moment of international recognition for Bangladeshi filmmaking.
Both films are due to be shown again at the Toronto International Film Festival, another major stop on the annual awards-season festival circuit, and Possible Love has a commercial release planned through Netflix later this year.
Full account
Two very different films are drawing attention at this year's Venice Film Festival: the market comeback of celebrated South Korean director Lee Chang-dong after an eight-year absence from features, and the first Bangladeshi film ever selected for the festival. The pairing highlights how Venice continues to showcase both established auteurs and emerging national cinemas on the same stage.
Lee Chang-dong's new film, Possible Love, premieres in the main Competition strand, marking his first feature since 2018's acclaimed Burning. Co-written with Oh Jung-mi, who also worked on Burning, the nearly three-hour drama follows two married couples whose lives become entangled: Mi-ok and her husband Ho-seok, whose job loss has left him withdrawn from his family, and a documentary-maker, Ye-ji, whose project on redundant workers brings her into close, uneasy contact with Mi-ok. Lee has said the long gap arose partly from what he calls his own timidity and his uncertainty about whether he was the right person to dramatise a real-life story of mass layoffs and labour unrest that inspired the script, having initially shelved the project years earlier. Netflix has scheduled a cinema release for 23 October, with the film reaching the streaming platform on 6 November.
The other notable premiere, screening in Venice's Horizons section, is The Difficult Bride, directed by Rubaiyat Hossain and billed as the first Bangladeshi feature ever selected for the festival. The film centres on a bride-to-be, played by newcomer Zaineen Chowdhury Karim, whose wedding preparations at a Dhaka beauty salon descend into a surreal, bodily ordeal, blending supernatural and grotesque imagery with a feminist critique of beauty standards. Hossain has traced the story back to a real death she heard about as a child while visiting a Dhaka salon with her mother, an image she says stayed with her for decades before it was first attempted as a short film in 2006 and eventually reworked into a feature.
Hossain frames the film as the concluding part of an informal trilogy about Bangladeshi womanhood across class lines, following her earlier works on middle-class and working-class women, with this new film turning to the country's wealthiest social circles. She has stressed that women themselves can help enforce oppressive beauty and social norms, resisting a simple men-versus-women reading of the story, while also weaving in glancing references to Bangladesh's political unrest and the policing of women's behaviour, without presenting the film as a direct commentary on any single period of upheaval.
Where outlets differ
Variety's account focuses on Rubaiyat Hossain and The Difficult Bride, emphasising the personal, autobiographical origins of the story, its feminist and gender-studies framing, and its place within Hossain's wider body of work about Bangladeshi women across social classes.
Deadline's account centres on Lee Chang-dong and Possible Love, framing the story around his long hiatus from filmmaking, his personal doubts about tackling a labour-rights narrative, and practical release details via Netflix, presented largely through a direct interview format.
The two reports cover unrelated films and directors bundled under a shared Venice Film Festival dateline; neither source directly comments on or cross-references the other's subject.
Coverage
- Variety — Rubaiyat Hossain on Bodies, Beauty and Venice, Toronto and London-Bound ‘The Difficult Bride,’ Clip Unveiled (EXCLUSIVE)
- Deadline — Lee Chang-dong On His Eight-Year Hiatus & Confident Return With Venice Competition Title ‘Possible Love’