Netflix pairs Lee Chang-dong's first short film with his Oscar-bound return

Netflix said Friday that "Heartbeat," the first short film ever directed by the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong, will become available to subscribers worldwide on Nov. 2, positioning the short as what the streamer called a lead-in to Lee's feature "Possible Love," which reaches the service globally four days later, on Nov. 6. The timing links two works, made several years apart, by a director who has spent much of his career working outside the volume demanded by a commercial industry.

The announcement, posted to Netflix's newsroom, frames "Heartbeat" as thematically continuous with "Possible Love" rather than as a standalone curiosity. Both works, the company said, center on labor instability and depression, concerns that have run through Lee's work since his 1997 debut, "Green Fish." "Heartbeat" will stream with subtitles in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French and German.

A commission from the WHO

"Heartbeat" was not originally conceived as a commercial release. Lee made it as part of a multi-director project organized by the World Health Organization and the Beijing Contemporary Art Fund, which commissioned a group of filmmakers to each direct a short film addressing depression. Production took place in late 2020 and early 2021, during the pandemic, and Lee has said the constraints of that period shaped how the film came together.

The film follows a young boy, Cheol, played by Kim Geon-u, who panics when his mother does not answer the phone and rushes home to find her. Jeon Do-yeon plays the mother; Sul Kyung-gu voices the father, who is staging a one-man protest after being dismissed from his job. "Heartbeat" premiered at the 23rd Jeonju International Film Festival in 2022, where Lee discussed the project's origins. "As far as I know, I was the last person to join the WHO's project of using short films to create awareness about depression," he said at the time, in remarks reported by The Korea Times, adding that he had nonetheless been the first director in the group to finish shooting.

"As far as I know, I was the last person to join the WHO's project of using short films to create awareness about depression."

Netflix has described the short as a four-day prelude to "Possible Love," a connection the company is making explicit by scheduling the two releases so close together. The pairing also gives subscribers a way to see, in miniature, the themes Lee would return to and expand four years later in his feature.

From Venice to the Oscar race

"Possible Love" is Lee's first feature in eight years, following 2018's "Burning," and it reunites him with Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu, adding Cho Yeo-jeong and Zo In-sung to the cast. The film follows Mi-ok, played by Jeon, whose husband has lost his job, as she grows close to a documentary filmmaker, played by Cho, who is following other laid-off workers. Netflix financed and produced the film, which is set against a Korea reshaped by artificial intelligence, immigration and mass layoffs.

The film premiered in competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, where a jury led by the actress and director Maggie Gyllenhaal awarded it the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, the festival's second-highest honor, at the closing ceremony on Sept. 12. (The Golden Lion went to May El-Toukhy's "Woman Unknown.") Multiple outlets, including The Korea Herald and Soompi, reported that the win made "Possible Love" the first Korean film to take the Grand Jury Prize at Venice. For Lee personally, it marked a return to the festival's top honors 24 years after he won the Silver Lion for best director there for "Oasis" in 2002. The film went on to screen in the Special Presentations section of the Toronto International Film Festival.

On Aug. 25, before the Venice premiere, the Korean Film Council named "Possible Love" the country's sole submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, citing what it called the director's "cool yet profound humanism" and the dimensionality of his characters, according to Cineplay. His previous feature, "Burning," became the first South Korean film to reach the Academy's foreign-language shortlist in 2018, though it was not ultimately nominated.

A staggered rollout, then a global stream

Rather than sending "Possible Love" straight to streaming, Netflix built in a limited theatrical run clearly timed to the Academy's qualification rules. The film opened in South Korean cinemas on Sept. 23, followed by Australia on Oct. 22 and the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Japan on Oct. 23, according to Netflix's own release announcement. Only after that run ends does the film move to the global Netflix library on Nov. 6.

That sequencing matters because the Academy requires a qualifying theatrical release for films entered in major categories, and because campaigns for the International Feature category typically rely on building critical momentum in the weeks after a festival prize before voters receive screeners. The Academy's own calendar, released by its press office, sets nominations for the 99th Academy Awards for Jan. 21, with the ceremony itself on March 14, giving "Possible Love" roughly eleven weeks between its global streaming debut and the nominations announcement to build support among voters who may be seeing it for the first time on Netflix rather than in a theater.

The release plan also extends to Lee's earlier work. Netflix has added his back catalog, including "Green Fish," "Peppermint Candy," "Oasis," "Secret Sunshine," "Poetry" and "Burning," giving subscribers encountering "Possible Love" or "Heartbeat" for the first time a way to trace a throughline the director has pursued since the late 1990s: ordinary people absorbing grief, labor precarity and, in these two most recent works, depression.

What happens next

For now, the immediate test is smaller: whether "Heartbeat," a film made for a public-health campaign rather than for distribution, draws an audience of its own when it lands on Netflix on Monday, or whether it functions mainly as the trailer Netflix is positioning it to be. The larger test comes in January, when the Academy's shortlist and then nominations will show whether a Silver Lion and a rare limited theatrical run were enough to carry "Possible Love" past the shortlist stage that stopped "Burning" eight years ago.