Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" earns a lengthy ovation in Venice competition return

Lee Chang-dong, the South Korean filmmaker behind "Burning," "Poetry" and "Secret Sunshine," returned to competition at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday for the first time in nearly a quarter-century, and the response left little doubt about how the Lido felt about the wait. "Possible Love," Lee's first feature since 2018, premiered in the Sala Grande to a standing ovation that ran past the six-minute mark, with the director and his four lead actors visibly moved as the applause rolled on. Trade estimates of the ovation's length varied slightly — Deadline clocked it at six and a half minutes, while other outlets put it at "over six minutes" — but the consensus among critics on site was unambiguous: it was the most rapturously received premiere of the festival so far.

A hero's welcome on the Lido

By the accounts of reporters who were there, the reception went beyond the ritual of a festival ovation. According to a dispatch from South Korea's Sports Khan, foreign press packed the film's official press conference and then surged toward the stage afterward, with journalists unusually asking Lee and his cast for autographs — a departure from the normally reserved decorum of Venice press events. The red carpet that followed drew heavy camera flashes and crowd noise as the cast, led by Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu, made their way into the Palazzo del Cinema.

The film screened as one of 21 titles competing for the Golden Lion at the 83rd edition of the festival, which opened September 2 and runs through September 12 under jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal, joined on the panel by filmmakers including Kaouther Ben Hania and Johnnie To. It is Lee's first film to compete at Venice since "Oasis" won the Silver Lion for best direction in 2002 — a 24-year gap that made Sunday's screening feel, to much of the audience, like the return of a director many had assumed might not make another film at all. This year's lineup also includes new work from Martin McDonagh and Hirokazu Kore-eda, and the festival separately presented lifetime achievement Golden Lions to Ellen Burstyn and George Clooney at its opening ceremony.

Two couples, one funeral, eight years in the making

"Possible Love," which runs 164 minutes according to the festival's official program listing, follows two married couples whose lives intersect after a funeral. Mi-ok and her laid-off husband, Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, live quietly with their young son after he loses his factory job amid labor unrest. Ye-ji, a documentary filmmaker played by Cho Yeo-jeong, sets out to film Ho-seok's story, drawing her and her wealthy husband, Sang-woo, played by Zo In-sung, into the other couple's orbit. Jeon Do-yeon rounds out the principal cast. Lee co-wrote the screenplay with his longtime collaborator Oh Jung-mi, who also worked with him on "Burning."

Lee has said the long gap between films was shaped by more than one factor. Discussing the film's origins with reporters in Venice, he pointed to the pandemic-era closure of theaters as one reason, but described a deeper unease as the real impetus for the story.

"There was the pandemic, a time when people couldn't come to theaters. Beyond that, I felt human relationships were fundamentally changing," Lee said, according to the Korea Herald.

In the director's statement distributed with the film's official program listing, Lee described "Possible Love" as a response to South Korea's recent history of mass layoffs and labor strife, and said he wanted to explore whether, despite that upheaval, "we can still move toward freedom — a desire that may itself be a form of love." Critics who reviewed the film out of Venice described it in similar terms: a slow-building, formally patient drama that trades the propulsive dread of "Burning" for something closer to the wounded tenderness of "Secret Sunshine" and "Poetry," Lee's earlier meditations on grief and human dignity.

A Golden Lion contender — and Korea's Oscar hope

The reception has immediately made "Possible Love" one of the films to beat when the Golden Lion is announced at the close of the festival. Should it win, it would be only the second Korean film to take Venice's top prize, after Kim Ki-duk's "Pieta" in 2012. The rest of the competition field is far from thin, but early reviews out of the Lido have singled out "Possible Love" as the most consistently praised title of the festival to date, a distinction that matters in a jury process where critical consensus can shift momentum in the final days before winners are chosen.

The film arrives with awards momentum on more than one front. In late August, South Korea's Korean Film Council selected "Possible Love" as the country's official submission for best international feature film at the Academy Awards, citing the film's "cinematic completeness, the clarity of the director's message and its excellent mise-en-scène." That decision was made before the film had screened publicly anywhere, a sign of how much confidence Korean industry figures had placed in Lee's return even ahead of Venice. Netflix, which is distributing the film worldwide, is expected to mount an awards campaign that extends beyond the international feature category, a person familiar with the studio's plans told the Korea Herald when the Oscar submission was announced.

Who's affected, and what happens next

For Netflix, the ovation validates a bet the streamer made in bringing one of Korean cinema's most acclaimed and least commercially predictable directors into its fold. The film is set for a limited theatrical run in the United States beginning October 23, ahead of a worldwide streaming premiere on Netflix on November 6, according to the official listing on Netflix's Tudum site; a South Korean theatrical release is scheduled for September 23. The film's page on Netflix is already live for prospective viewers to queue up ahead of release, a rollout pattern the platform has used before to pair a festival launch with a compressed theatrical window and a same-season streaming debut.

For the film's cast, the response adds momentum heading into a fall festival circuit that Lee and his actors are expected to continue: "Possible Love" carries invitations to both the Toronto International Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival in the coming weeks, according to reporting from Sports Khan, extending its exposure well beyond the Lido before it opens commercially.

The most immediate test comes on September 12, when Gyllenhaal's jury — which also includes filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania and director Johnnie To — announces the festival's awards at the closing ceremony. A Golden Lion win would cap an unusually fast turnaround for a film that had not screened for the public before Sunday, and would hand Lee, now 71, the rare distinction of having won prizes at Venice a generation apart. Whether or not it takes the top prize, distributors and awards strategists on the Lido are already treating "Possible Love" as one of the season's defining festival premieres — and a reminder, after an eight-year absence, of why Lee's return was so anticipated in the first place.