South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong is back on screen after eight years, and Netflix has released the official trailer for Possible Love just days before the film’s world premiere. The 164-minute drama will compete for the Golden Lion at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 6, then continue through Toronto and New York before reaching theaters and the streamer.
The new trailer sketches that collision without explaining it, cutting from cramped domestic rooms to a documentary lens and then toward a shared holiday that feels less like rest than a test. One character says it would be nice to go on a vacation together, while the footage lingers on a funeral, factory labor, beachfront ease, and glances that last a little too long, ending on a strange and unsettled note rather than a conventional sales pitch.
Possible Love follows two married couples whose lives intersect after a funeral. Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) lives quietly with her laid-off husband, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and their young son, Cheol, until that gathering pulls them into the orbit of Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong), a documentary filmmaker chronicling laid-off workers, and her husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).
When Mi-ok agrees to be filmed, she grows close to Ye-ji and finds herself uneasily drawn to the unreadable Sang-woo. The affluent couple’s lifestyle stands in sharp contrast to the factory household, and the four adults are soon forced to look at the gaps they have learned to live with.
The official premise is spare and pointed. Four strangers cross paths by chance, and the resulting entanglements challenge their existing relationships while pressing them toward uncomfortable truths about love and commitment.
Lee Chang-dong co-wrote the screenplay with Oh Jung-mi, his collaborator on Burning. The film is produced by Lee Joon-dong, David Levine, and Chadwick Prichard for Pinehouse Film, Anonymous Content, and Nowfilm, with cinematography by Kim Ji-yong and a score by Jung Jae-il.
The reunion on camera is also a reunion behind it. Jeon Do-yeon won the Cannes best actress prize for Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, and Sul Kyung-gu starred in the director’s Peppermint Candy and Oasis before this new pairing.
Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong are working with the director for the first time, completing one of the most concentrated gatherings of Korean screen talent in a single film. Key art showing Mi-ok and Ye-ji standing apart beneath moonlit trees at dawn already hints at a reckoning rather than a romance.
South Korea has selected Possible Love as its official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards. Netflix is giving the title a qualifying theatrical path before the global launch, opening the film in Korean cinemas on September 23.
Australia follows on October 22, with select engagements in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Japan on October 23. The worldwide Netflix premiere is set for November 6.
The Venice berth marks Lee Chang-dong’s first return to the Lido since Oasis took the Silver Lion for best director in 2002. After Venice, the film moves to the Special Presentations section of the 51st Toronto International Film Festival and later to the New York Film Festival.
Possible Love is Lee Chang-dong’s first feature since Burning, the 2018 drama that won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes and became the first Korean film shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. The new work arrives with a heavier runtime and a cooler surface, asking whether two marriages can survive the sudden visibility of class, desire, and care.
Source: Netflix
