Lee Chang-dong Returns to Venice After 24 Years. Netflix Is Sending Him to Theaters First
Possible Love premieres in Venice competition on September 6, opens in Korean cinemas on September 23 and reaches Netflix on November 6. It is Lee Chang-dong's first film in eight years, and the order of those three dates is the most interesting decision anyone made about it.
Director Lee Chang-dong speaking into a handheld microphone in a dark grey shirt-jacket at a screening of Green Fish at the Cinematheque francaise in Paris, 2018. · FR (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Eight years of quiet, and a festival that remembered him
Lee Chang-dong will premiere Possible Love in the main competition of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 6. It is his first feature since Burning in 2018, and his first film in Venice competition since Oasis won him the Silver Lion for best direction in 2002. Twenty-four years is a long time to stay away from the festival that handed you its directing prize.
Six features between 1997 and 2018, and then eight years of nothing. Green Fish, Peppermint Candy, Oasis, Secret Sunshine, Poetry, Burning. He published fiction before he shot anything, served as South Korea's culture minister in 2003 and 2004, and went back to writing scripts afterward. The gaps in that filmography are not accidents of financing. They are how the work gets made.
What comes out the other end has a particular quality that Korean cinema does not otherwise produce much of: films that refuse to tell you how to feel about a person who has done something terrible, or something merely weak. Secret Sunshine watches a woman try to forgive her son's killer and does not decide whether she manages it. Burning ends without confirming whether a crime happened at all. Lee holds a shot until the audience has to do the moral work themselves.
The new film is two marriages and a documentary camera
Possible Love follows two married couples whose lives cross after a funeral. Mi-ok and her husband Ho-seok, who has lost his job, live quietly with their young son. Ye-ji is a filmmaker shooting a documentary about laid-off workers; her husband Sang-woo is comfortable in a way the first couple is not. Mi-ok agrees to be filmed. The two women grow close. Mi-ok finds herself pulled toward Sang-woo, and both marriages begin to show cracks.
Lee co-wrote the screenplay with Oh Jung-mi, who worked with him on Burning. The setup is almost schematic on paper — one couple with money, one without, a camera between them — and that is precisely the kind of frame Lee has always used to get somewhere unschematic. Peppermint Candy runs a man's life backward through twenty years of Korean history. Poetry gives an elderly woman a writing class and a grandson who has done something unforgivable.
The documentary inside the film is the part worth watching for. A woman with a camera pointing it at a woman without one, then getting involved with her subject's life, is a setup about the ethics of looking. Lee has spent a career on characters who cannot look away and cannot help.
Four actors who have already done this kind of work
Jeon Do-yeon plays Mi-ok. She won at Cannes for Secret Sunshine, playing the mother who tries to forgive, and the reunion is the single strongest reason to expect something from this film. Nobody currently working is better at showing a person who has decided to be fine and is not.
Sul Kyung-gu plays Ho-seok. He was the man at the centre of Oasis, the film that took Lee to Venice in the first place. Zo In-sung plays Sang-woo and Cho Yeo-jeong plays Ye-ji. Cho spent years in roles that asked less of her than she could give, then was very good indeed as the wealthy, credulous mother in Parasite.
Two of these four have already stood at the centre of a Lee Chang-dong film that won at a festival — Jeon took the acting prize at Cannes herself, and Sul carried the picture that won Lee his Silver Lion. That is not nostalgia casting. It is a director going back to the actors who understood what he wanted the first time.
Netflix bought a film that needs the room to stay quiet
Netflix is behind Possible Love, produced with Pinehouse Film, Anonymous Content and NOWFILM. The company announced the project in 2025, and its own release notes list the four leads with their character names.
This is the interesting part. Lee's films work on patience. They contain long stretches where nothing announces itself, and the payoff depends on an audience that has not been checking its phone for the previous forty minutes. A streaming platform is the most hostile possible delivery system for that, not because of any judgment about streaming, but because of the pause button and the second screen and the option to bail at minute twenty.
Netflix seems to know it. The film goes to Venice competition, then to Toronto, then into Korean cinemas on September 23, and only reaches the service globally on November 6. That sequence puts roughly six weeks between the theatrical opening in the director's own country and the streaming date.
September 23 in Korea is the date that matters
A theatrical run before a streaming release is often described as awards positioning, and it is partly that. But the Korean opening is doing something else. It gives the film six weeks in front of audiences who will sit in the dark, in a market where Lee Chang-dong is a major cultural figure rather than a name on a festival list.
Korean box office this month has already shown that a domestic audience will turn out for a long, serious film — Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey took the majority of the Korean weekend market in mid-August and grew in its second session, while the summer's biggest superhero release settled for second place there. That is not proof of anything about Possible Love. It does suggest the theatre is not the wrong place to put a demanding film in that country.
What Netflix cannot buy is the thing Lee's films are made of, which is time. Eight years of it went into this one. The company has arranged the calendar so that the first people to see it will be sitting still, in the dark, unable to skip ahead. Whether the film earns that arrangement is what the Lido will find out on September 6.
Every factual claim above is drawn from these. The reading of them is ours.
Lee Chang-dong Possible LoveVenice Film Festival 2026 competitionNetflix Korean filmJeon Do-yeon Sul Kyung-guPossible Love release dateKorean cinema 2026
