[Edaily Starin YUN GI BACK Reporter] A film that was once abandoned has been revived after more than a decade and made it all the way to Venice. Director Lee Chang-dong’s new film, “Possible Love,” is not merely a comeback after an eight-year hiatus. It is a project that the director himself had set aside after wrestling with the question, “Do I have the right to tell this story?”—a project that has finally been completed in a completely different form after a long period of time.

The starting point for *Possible Love* was the large-scale layoffs, strikes, and harsh crackdown that took place at a major South Korean conglomerate in 2009. At the time, Director Lee judged this incident to be a significant event that shook not only the labor market but also the lives and relationships of ordinary people. He subsequently conceived a story centered on a couple of laid-off workers and even began working on the screenplay.
However, the film project soon came to a halt. With a documentary already in existence that faithfully documented the lives and suffering of the actual workers, he was unsure whether it was justified for him to reenact the story as a fictional film.
In a recent interview with a foreign media outlet, Director Lee reflected on that time, revealing that he had asked himself, “Do I have the right to tell this story?” Ultimately, unable to find an answer, he shelved the project. The story, which had begun with the intention of becoming a film, remained a “drawer project” for a long time.
The turning point came with writer Oh Jeong-mi. Oh, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film *Burning* with Director Lee, suggested that instead of simply following the story of the laid-off workers, they should also incorporate the story of a documentary filmmaker attempting to capture their lives on camera.
This idea shifted the direction of the film. It went a step beyond directly reenacting labor struggles to incorporate into the film the very act of observing and documenting another person’s suffering. It led the filmmakers to explore questions such as how far art can go in addressing someone’s pain and what responsibilities come with capturing another person’s life on camera.
Ultimately, *Possible Love* was reborn as a work that expanded beyond the labor film initially envisioned to explore the distance between people and the gaze directed at another’s suffering.
Director Lee also revealed in the official Venice Film Festival introduction that he had long wrestled with whether it was right to turn this incident into a feature film. This was also the reason why the film took so long to complete.
The story he had once set aside eventually returned, carrying with it the very question he had pondered the longest. The journey of this “movie in a drawer”—shelved for over a decade—to its selection in the competition section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, where it received critical acclaim, reflects Director Lee Chang-dong’s distinctive path of decision-making just as much as the film *Possible Love* itself.