Lee Chang-dong: the novelist who made cinema wait

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 1, 1954 Daegu, South Korea
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Burning, Poetry, Oasis
Awards	2 Silver Lion · Best Screenplay, Cannes Film Festival · FIPRESCI Prize, Venice Film Festival · Légion d’Honneur, France

There is a question that follows Lee Chang-dong from interview to interview, delivered with varying degrees of impatience: why does he take so long? The filmmaker’s answer, more or less consistent across decades, is that he only makes a film when he has something specific to say — not a theme to explore, not a genre to inhabit, not a production deal to honor, but something that requires cinema and could not be anything else. Whether that explanation reassures or frustrates depends entirely on whether you’ve seen what he does with the time.

Possible Love, his seventh feature, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in September 2026 — a film about two married couples from opposite ends of the Korean economic spectrum whose lives collide around a documentary project one of them is making. It is the first film Lee has released since Burning in 2018. The eight years between them are not unusual for him. Between Poetry and Burning there were also eight years. Between Secret Sunshine and Poetry, three.

Lee was born in Daegu, South Korea, in 1954, the third of four brothers. He studied Korean literature at Kyungpook National University, graduated in 1981, and spent the years immediately after teaching high school Korean. He published his first novella through the Dong-A Ilbo literary contest in 1983, which was how Korean writers established themselves then — through newspaper-sponsored competitions that carried real institutional weight. He continued writing while teaching, and what he wrote during those years showed the same preoccupations that would later define his films: ordinary lives bent out of shape by political violence, by grief that refuses to resolve, by a social contract that promises one thing and delivers another.

His entry into filmmaking was not a conversion; it was more like a lateral move. Approaching forty, he joined Jang Sun-woo’s production for To the Starry Island as an assistant director — without formal training in the craft, and with no obvious reason to expect the transition would work. He argued that his understanding of narrative was transferable. It was. When the original first AD failed to appear on the first day of shooting, Lee was promoted in his place. Four years later he directed Green Fish, his debut feature: a crime film about a young man destroyed by the gap between the Korea he imagined and the one he returned home to find.

What distinguishes Lee’s filmmaking from the generation that followed him — the one that produced Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook — is not style but a specific kind of patience. His films have no interest in momentum as an end in itself. They take time with silence, with the look on a face that has just received news it cannot process, with the particular indignity of spiritual seeking in a world that doesn’t reward it. Secret Sunshine (2007) gave Jeon Do-yeon the Best Actress prize at Cannes for a performance of agonizing interiority; Poetry (2010) won Cannes’ Best Screenplay for its portrait of a woman trying to write her first poem while her grandson’s crime destroys what remains of her life.

Both films were praised extravagantly and then quietly filed under “difficult Korean cinema,” which is what the industry does with work that won’t accelerate. Burning (2018) changed the frame somewhat. Adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story, it reached an audience that had not encountered Lee’s earlier work; the Cannes critics’ poll gave it a perfect score; it became the first Korean film shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a year before Parasite won it. Lee gave few interviews during the eight years that followed.

The critical case against his body of work — and there is one — usually involves the charge that his films aestheticize their characters’ suffering: that a woman in Secret Sunshine who loses her son to kidnap and murder and then loses her faith in a devastating confrontation with her captor’s prison conversion is being handled at such formal distance that the film substitutes beauty for empathy. Lee does not quite answer this charge — he absorbs it and moves on. What Possible Love suggests is that the charge has made him think: the film’s structure, centered on the act of documentary filmmaking itself, is openly skeptical of the camera’s authority over the lives it records.

From 2003 to 2004 Lee served as South Korea’s Minister of Culture and Tourism under President Roh Moo-hyun, focusing his tenure on the defense of Korean screen quotas against US trade pressure. France recognized the work with the Légion d’Honneur in 2006. It is not the only time his biography has surprised. A man who describes his creative process as “one of utter despair” is also a professor at the Korean National University of Arts, where he has taught since 2001, and whose youngest brother, Lee Joon-dong, produces his films.

At seventy-two, the slowness is no longer a subject for impatience. Possible Love stars Jeon Do-yeon — in her second collaboration with Lee, twenty years after Secret Sunshine — alongside Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung, and Cho Yeo-jeong. It arrives in South Korean cinemas in September 2026 and on Netflix worldwide in November.