Possible Love (2026)
Director: Lee Chang-dong Run Time: 165 min. Rating: R Release Year: 2026
Starring: Cho Yeo-jeong, Jeon Do-yeon, Jeong Seop, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung
Country: South Korea, United States
Language: Korean
About the film:
A laid-off worker and his wife cross paths with a documentary filmmaker and her spouse and confront their hidden desires.
“A heart-stopping and novelistically layered stunner from modern cinema’s most literary auteur”
—David Ehrlich for IndieWire
Possible Love (2026) won the the Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. The film is South Korea’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the upcoming 99th Academy Awards.
About the filmmakers:
Lee Chang-dong is a South Korean director, screenwriter, and novelist. When he was young, he hoped to become a painter, but he made a name for himself in the theater and literary worlds. Chang-dong did not get come into filmmaking until he was nearly 40, beginning his career as a screenwriter and assistant director for Park Kwang-su, a key figure of the Korean New Wave of the late 1980s and 1990s. He has written and directed only six features across more than twenty years, but these exquisite films have placed him among the most admired and respected auteurs in cinema.
A celebrated academic and novelist in South Korea whose fiction earned him accolades well before his foray into cinema, Lee writes and directs harrowing tales that place his characters in extreme psychological and physical agony to test the limits of the human spirit. An elderly woman at the onset of Alzheimer’s confronts her grandchild’s utter indifference to morality in Poetry (2010); a single mother endures a cascade of tragedies in Secret Sunshine (2007); a man suffers the forces of South Korea’s tumultuous history in Peppermint Candy (1999). His tightly structured plot lines deliver unflinching exposés of pain, trauma, and rage. He appears to follow conventional genre tropes, from melodrama to noir and gangster flicks, only to subvert audience expectations with exceptionally complex stories that leave them to contemplate perplexing existential, spiritual, and moral questions. Burning (2018), Chang-dong’s most recent film, is regarded as one of his strangest yet. The film premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize.
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