Lee Chang-dong on Filming Another Person's Pain
South Korean director Lee Chang-dong has described his seventh feature film, Possible Love, as a question about how to portray another person's story and pain, what position the filmmaker occupies while doing so, and how much distance to keep. He made the remarks in an interview with The Verge, published on 2026-10-24. The conversation took place during Lee's trip to New York and was conducted in Korean, with the English version translated.
The film is inspired by events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate, a company that owns many businesses across different industries, fired 2,600 employees, a third of its workforce. Many people died by suicide in the period that followed. The story is built around two married couples. Jeon Do-yeon plays Mi-ok, whose husband Ho-seok, played by Sul Kyung-gu, is laid off. Cho Yeo-jeong plays Ye-ji, a documentary filmmaker, and Zo In-sung plays her husband, Sang-woo. The film opens with the epigraph "Thou shall not covet."
Lee went to school in Daegu through university. As a university student, he took part in the May 1980 protests against the military-led government of Chun Doo-hwan. That history bears on the questions he raised in the interview. He described the ethics of the camera as connected to an earlier concern voiced by Bong Joon Ho, who had worried about portraying a mother's pain and whether he had the right to do so.
Possible Love marks Lee's first feature in eight years. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it was one of 21 films competing for the Golden Lion, the festival's top prize, according to Reuters. The same report says South Korea nominated the film as its entry for next year's Oscars.
In my view, the most useful way into this film is the one Lee himself chose: treating the camera as a moral instrument rather than only a stylistic one. A layoff story told from inside a household, with a documentary filmmaker among the characters, puts the act of observation under strain. The filmmaker's gaze becomes one of the subjects. Lee's framing of distance as something to be decided, not assumed, is a sensible lens for an audience to bring to the work.
The broader context here is a long-running tension in Korean cinema between social catastrophe and the individual lives that absorb it. The 2009 dismissals were a specific corporate and labour event, and the film draws on that specificity. Lee's remarks suggest he is less interested in reconstructing the event as a record than in examining what it means for a person outside the event to represent it. Documentary practice has no settled answer to that question.
Possible Love arrives as Lee returns after an eight-year gap, with a premiere in competition at Venice and a South Korean Oscar submission already announced. For viewers who follow both Korean cinema and the wider question of how fiction handles real suffering, the film's central concern is the one Lee put in plain terms: how close to stand, and by what right.
