Director Lee Chang-dong's 'Possible Love' Wins Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at Venice Film Festival

[Anchor]

Director Lee Chang-dong's new film, "Possible Love," has won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice Film Festival.

Reporter Lee Joo-hyoung has the details.

[Reporter]

[Maggie Gyllenhaal / Jury President: The Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize goes to "Possible Love" by director Lee Chang-dong.]

"Possible Love," a new work by one of South Korea's representative directors, Lee Chang-dong, has captured the Grand Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice Film Festival.

The festival's highest honor is the Golden Lion, while the Grand Jury Prize and Best Director award both correspond to the Silver Lion.

Director Lee previously won the Silver Lion for Best Director with "Oasis" in 2002.

This marks the first time a South Korean film has won an award in the Venice Film Festival's competition section in 14 years, following director Kim Ki-duk's "Pieta," which won the Golden Lion in 2012.

"Possible Love" tells the story of a laid-off worker couple alongside a wealthy producer and director couple who are filming them for a documentary.

[Lee Chang-dong / Director: In an era where labor is disappearing and human-to-human relationships are being severed, I made this film to ask what cinema can do, and what cinema must do.]

Actors Jeon Do-yeon and Sol Kyung-gu star as the laid-off worker couple, while Cho Yeo-jeong and Jo In-sung appear as the documentary producer couple.

The film is a project that Director Lee has meticulously developed over roughly 10 years, drawing inspiration from the large-scale corporate restructurings and resulting labor strikes that shook South Korean society in the 2000s.

Despite the director's international and domestic renown—having previously won awards at both the Cannes and Venice film festivals—the movie struggled to find domestic investors and was ultimately produced as a Netflix original film.

Consequently, "Possible Love" is scheduled to screen in select local theaters for a brief period starting on the 23rd before its release on Netflix in November.

Meanwhile, this year's Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival was awarded to director May el-Toukhy's World War II-set film "The Unknown Woman," while the Silver Lion for Best Director went to Russian dissident director Ilya Khrzhanovsky for "DAU."

(Video Editing: Choi Hye-ran)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.