It’s an improbable pairing yet nonetheless exciting news for film buffs: Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong is returning to filmmaking to direct a feature project backed by Netflix. Titled Possible Love, the drama is Lee’s first movie in eight years since his critically acclaimed Haruki Murakami adaptation, Burning.
The new film reunites Lee with the stars of his most critically revered earlier work. Possible Love‘s story is said to follow “the intertwined lives of two married couples leading completely opposite lives. As their worlds collide, fractures begin to appear in their daily existence.”
Korean screen royalty Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu will play the lead couple, Mi-ok and Ho-seok. Jeon previously won the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress honor for her performance as the indelible lead of Lee’s searing 2007 drama Secret Sunshine, and Sul was unforgettable in the lead roles of the director’s early masterpieces Peppermint Candy (1999) and Oasis (2002). The duo also has longstanding screen chemistry, thanks to previous pairings in the Korean features I Wish I Had a Wife (2001), Birthday (2019) and Kill Boksoon (2023).
The second couple — Sang-woo and Ye-ji — will be played by Zo In-sung (Moving, Escape from Mogadishu) and Cho Yeo-jeong (best remembered as a rich wife from Parasite).
Possible Love is co-written by Lee and Oh Jung-mi, his prior writing partner on Burning. The film is produced by Pine House Film, which also backed Burning.
An international cult favorite, Lee is revered for the philosophical nerve that suffuses his rigorously inventive melodramas, which variously pick apart the complexities of Korean society. He began his working life as a high-school teacher, later becoming an accomplished novelist before transitioning to screenwriting and directing with his breakthrough debut, Green Fish (1997). He also made a brief, improbable foray into government, serving as South Korea’s Minister of Culture and Tourism from 2003 to 2004 (his stint was marked by a bold but ultimately failed attempt to institute screen quotas for independently financed filmmaking). Last year, Penguin Random House published Lee’s first collection of short stories translated into English, Snowy Day & Other Stories. Several of his stories were previously translated and published by The New Yorker.
Although he’s directed just six features over his 30-year film career, Lee has consistently won honors at the major European festivals — but he’s never gone home with one of the event’s top prizes or received an Oscar nomination. Oasis (2002) won the special director’s prize at the 59th Venice Film Festival; Secret Sunshine took best actress at Cannes; Poetry received the best screenplay award in Cannes; and Burning won the French fest’s international critics’ prize.