Name: Possible Love
Director: Lee Chang-dong

Lee Chang-dong has world-premiered Possible Love in the main competition of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, his first feature since Burning eight years ago and the film South Korea has already chosen to carry into the Oscar race. For a director who releases roughly once a decade, a new title is the event in itself; that it arrives competing for the Golden Lion, with a marquee Korean cast and Netflix behind it, only sharpens the appetite.

The scarcity is the point. Lee has made six features in a quarter of a century, and each has been treated as a small state occasion of Korean cinema — Peppermint Candy, Oasis, Secret Sunshine, Poetry, Burning. He does not work fast, and he does not repeat himself. Possible Love is credited to Lee and his Burning co-writer Oh Jung-mi, and it runs a deliberate 164 minutes, with a score by Jung Jae-il, the composer who scored Parasite.

The premise is quintessential Lee: unhurried, moral, built on people who cannot quite say what they want. Two married couples — a laid-off worker and his wife, a documentary filmmaker and her affluent husband — are drawn together by the shooting of a documentary, and the film watches their different lives and hidden desires rub against one another. It is a reunion film twice over: Jeon Do-yeon, who won Best Actress at Cannes for Lee’s Secret Sunshine, plays Mi-ok, and Sul Kyung-gu, the wrenching lead of Oasis and Peppermint Candy, plays Ho-seok. Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong complete the quartet.

What makes this premiere unusual is the machinery around it. Possible Love is a Korea–United States co-production and, once its festival run and theatrical windows are done, a Netflix film — the kind of slow, adult, unhurried drama the streaming era is supposed to have squeezed out, arriving with exactly that pedigree and exactly that home. It is also, simultaneously, South Korea’s official submission for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, Lee’s fourth after Oasis, Secret Sunshine and Burning, none of which converted a submission into a nomination. The country is betting that this is the one that finally does.

Venice has history with him, too. Lee last stood on the Lido 24 years ago, when Oasis took the Silver Lion for best director and made Moon So-ri a star; he has not been back in competition since. A festival that prizes the return of major authors could hardly have scripted a cleaner one.

What a first screening cannot settle is whether restraint still reads as mastery or as caution, and 164 minutes is a long time to hold an audience on withheld feeling. That is the honest wager of the film, and it is not one a synopsis answers in advance.

Possible Love competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It opens in South Korean cinemas on 23 September and in the United States on 23 October before reaching Netflix worldwide on 6 November.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Lee Chang-dong, Possible Love, Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu