Critics Rank It First, Bettors Give It 55%: Lee Chang-dong's Venice Film Has Both

Lee Chang-dong's A Possible Love won the Grand Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 13 (local time), taking the award at the closing ceremony held at the Palazzo del Cinema. It is the first time a Korean film has won a prize in Venice's main competition since Kim Ki-duk's Pieta claimed the Golden Lion in 2012.

The win had been building in plain sight. After its premiere on the 6th, A Possible Love sat near the top of critic score aggregates for most of the festival's run, ranked first among international outlets including The Hollywood Reporter, Screen International, and The Guardian, with a weighted average of 4.61 out of 5. Italian media ranked it third behind Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine and Hirokazu Kore-eda's Look Back, but the consensus across all outlets was that the film was among the festival's strongest entries. American betting sites had placed its odds of a major award at roughly 55 percent heading into the final weekend.

A film built in layers

A Possible Love follows two couples drawn together by a documentary film project: a laid-off worker named Ho-seok and his wife Mi-ok, and a documentary director named Ye-ji and her husband Sang-u. The project forces them into close contact, where contrasting lives and buried desires surface gradually. The screenplay was co-written by Lee and writer Oh Jeong-mi.

Sol Kyung-gu plays Ho-seok, Jeon Do-yeon plays Mi-ok, Jo Yeo-jeong plays Ye-ji, and Jo In-sung plays Sang-u. The Hollywood Reporter described the film as "an intense reflection on economic and emotional precarity," saying it weaves "the trauma of labor, lost dignity, and class envy into a humanism where despair and hope coexist." FIPRESCI, which also awarded the film its critics' prize on the 12th, called it a film that "explores exploitation, class, disillusionment, love, desire, and the ownership and ethics of storytelling," rendered "with subtle power games unfolding at a multilayered and impeccable pace."

The FIPRESCI award is Lee's second from Venice in that category, Oasis received it in 2002, alongside the Silver Lion for Best Director and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for newcomer Moon So-ri. This time, the Grand Jury Prize brings his Venice trophy count to three.

Where this fits in a long career

A Possible Love is Lee's first feature since Burning in 2018, a gap of eight years. That film famously dominated critic scores at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival yet left without a prize, losing out to Kore-eda's Shoplifters. The outcome has become a standard reference point in conversations about the gap between critical consensus and jury decisions, and it gave this Venice campaign a particular edge of unfinished business.

With this win, Lee has now collected five trophies across the three major festivals. Jeon Do-yeon won Best Actress at Cannes in 2007 for Secret Sunshine, and Poetry won the Cannes screenplay prize in 2010. The pattern across his filmography, dense political, social, and ethical layering inside intimate domestic narratives, is precisely what Venice juries have historically responded to, and A Possible Love appears to continue that approach without concession.

For Korean cinema more broadly, the win extends a decade-long run of international festival recognition that has accelerated since Parasite's 2019 Palme d'Or. Venice has been the quieter front in that story: the last Korean winner before tonight was Pieta's Golden Lion, making this the sixth time a Korean film or performer has placed on the Venice competition podium. The full list runs from Kang Soo-yeon's Volpi Cup for Surrogate Mother in 1987 through Kim Ki-duk's back-to-back director prizes in 2004 and his Golden Lion in 2012.

A Possible Love opens in Korean theaters on the 23rd and is scheduled to arrive on Netflix on November 6.