Nine days after taking home a Silver Lion in Venice, Lee Chang-dong was back in Seoul, and the first thing he wanted to talk about wasn’t the trophy. At a press conference on Monday, September 21, the director said the Possible Love Silver Lion win mattered less to him than how audiences actually responded. Venice was where the film first met viewers, and that reaction was what he had been waiting to see.
The Netflix-financed drama won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 12, as the Korea Times reported. It is Lee’s first feature in eight years.
What was said in Seoul
The event followed a press screening at CGV Yongsan I’Park Mall. Lee sat with actors Sul Kyung-gu, Cho Yeo-jeong and Zo In-sung, while Jeon Do-yeon joined by video from the United States.
Asked about the Possible Love Silver Lion win, Lee said he was happy and honored, but called the prize “merely a result”. What reassured him most, he explained, was that a film he described as neither easy nor sensational still seemed to reach the Venice audience, who appeared to pick up on the questions it raises.
He also spoke about how he works. Lee said he once believed withholding approval from actors was part of his attitude to cinema, since he felt the answers belonged to them. That changed while making Poetry with the late Yun Jung-hee, and he now gives the go-ahead freely. Jeon, who worked with him on Secret Sunshine in 2007, said she had braced for another difficult shoot and instead found the set so comfortable it felt healing.
Sul described the Venice premiere, where he cried after the screening. As the applause went on, he said, memories of filming in Goheung ran through his head. Zo added a lighter story: after the festival press conference, foreign journalists rushed him for autographs, which he took as a sign of how far Korean cinema’s standing has grown.
The story behind the film
The film follows two couples brought together by a documentary project. Ho-seok (Sul) is a laid-off worker carrying deep emotional scars, and his wife Mi-ok (Jeon) fights to protect her family’s dignity. On the other side are Ye-ji (Cho), an ambitious documentary maker, and her wealthy husband Sang-woo (Zo).
Lee said the idea grew out of a corporate layoff and violent crackdown that happened more than a decade ago. He didn’t want to address labour and social class in one simple way, he said, but across several layers: laid-off workers, class conflict and a filmmaker’s ethics. At Venice, he said he made the film to ask what cinema can and should do in an age when work is disappearing and human bonds are fraying. Netflix financed it, and Oh Jung-mi co-wrote it.
Why the Possible Love Silver Lion win matters
For Lee, this closes a 24-year loop. He won the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice in 2002 with Oasis, and returned to the same festival this year for the Grand Jury Prize, the festival’s second-highest honour. The Golden Lion went to May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown.
Korean media are treating it as a national moment. According to the Korea Times, President Lee Jae Myung congratulated the team on X, hoping the win would broaden the diversity of Korean cinema. The paper also reports a seven-minute standing ovation at the premiere and says the film has been chosen as South Korea’s official entry for Best International Feature at the Oscars.
There’s a distribution angle too: a streamer financed an auteur drama, and it still gets a proper theatrical run before reaching a global streaming audience. How that plays out at the box office is something the Possible Love Silver Lion win can’t answer yet.
What comes next
Possible Love opens in South Korean cinemas on Wednesday, September 23. A limited US run aimed at Oscar eligibility follows on October 23, and the film reaches Netflix worldwide on November 6. Whether the Venice momentum turns into audiences in Seoul is the first real test.