Lee Chang-dong returns with Possible Love and takes the prize just below the Lion

The most predicted Golden Lion of the year did not win the Golden Lion. Lee Chang-dong returned to competition with Possible Love and left Venice with the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize — the runner-up laurel that a festival hands to the film it most respects and least wants to argue about. For a director who has spent his career being the safest bet in any competition he enters, it is a familiar shape: universally admired, narrowly out-crowned.

Possible Love is his first film in the main competition since Burning, the 2018 drama that topped critics’ polls and became a landmark of Korean cinema’s arthouse decade. Seven years is a long silence from a filmmaker who works slowly by design, and the anticipation around the return was the engine of the festival’s forecasts — this outlet among them had it as the Lion frontrunner going into the ceremony.

Lee’s cinema has always run on the same current: ordinary people undone by a grief or a longing that arrives obliquely, filmed with a patience that lets meaning surface rather than announcing it. From Secret Sunshine to Poetry to Burning, he builds emotion out of withholding, trusting the viewer to close the distance. A title like Possible Love — conditional, unfinished — is squarely inside that sensibility, and it is the kind of restraint a jury respects even when it reaches for something louder at the very top.

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The Grand Jury Prize is also a reading of how the night broke. When a jury gives its top award to a discovery — May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown — the established master often lands one step down, not as a demotion but as the jury’s way of honouring a career while betting on a newcomer. That the two films finished one-two, a Danish debut-scale surprise above a Korean institution, is the clearest statement Maggie Gyllenhaal’s panel made about where it wanted to point attention.

The stakes reach past the Lido. Possible Love arrives as South Korea’s awards-season standard-bearer, and a major Venice prize is exactly the launch an international campaign wants — proof of competition-level pedigree without the burden of favourite status a Lion would have imposed. For Lee, whose films tend to grow in reputation across the years rather than in their opening weekends, a Grand Jury Prize may be the more durable trophy anyway.

What it unlocks is a long runway. The film now travels the autumn festival circuit with a Venice laurel on the poster and a seven-year absence framed as a return that paid off. Lee Chang-dong did not win the prize everyone forecast — but he won the one that ages best, and left the Lido as the auteur the whole season will measure itself against.

Tags: South Korea, Venice Film Festival, recap, Lee Chang-dong, Possible Love, Grand Jury Prize

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