In Possible Love , the director of Burning tackles labor struggle, human connection, and the nature of capturing others on film.
📌 The Core Development
In Possible Love , the director of Burning tackles labor struggle, human connection, and the nature of capturing others on film.
Lee Chang Dong’s seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff – 2,600 employees – after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor or religion or compressed modernity , that uniquely Korean affliction, without feeling didactic.
🔍 Background & Sector Context
A different kind of movie would have captured the heat of that labor struggle. Possible Love picks up with the characters in the aftermath, a murkier time that defies easy understanding. The film opens with an epigraph: “Thou shall not covet.” What follows is a movie about characters who covet. They covet each other’s job, designer clothes, spouses, and positionality. Mi-ok (Jeon Do-Yeon) is the long-suffering wife of Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), her laid-off husband. At a funeral of a colleague who died by suicide, Mi-ok and Ho-seok meet another couple, documentary filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her rich husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). And off we go.
The Verge spoke with Lee during his trip to New York about how he arrived at his politics, porousness between people, the properties of the camera, and what it is like to work with Netflix. The interview was conducted in Korean and translated into English.
📊 Industry & Real-World Impact
I am also from Daegu. I wonder how this fact shaped you? And more broadly, to whom or what do you owe your political education?
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🔮 Strategic Outlook & What Lies Ahead
As you know well, Daegu is referred to as the heartland of conservatism in Korea. I went to school there, all the way through university, so I grew up steeped in that conservative disposition and was influenced by it. But until I graduated from college, in the spring of 1980, I didn’t realize how politically conservative Daegu citizens were.
That spring, in May of 1980, I participated in protests against the Chun Doo-hwan regime as a university student. It was on the streets that I met them, the citizens, and experienced their hardline sentiments in a visceral way. It was shocking to me. Afterwards, I thought a lot about how come the people in Daegu were so politically conservative. In light of all that, the thoughts of a person I perceive as myself, that person’s attitude towards the world, could only be bound with a certain kind of tension.
