Lee Chang-dong's First Film in 8 Years Is South Korea's Oscar Entry for 2027

South Korea's Korean Film Council (KOFIC) announced on the 25th that Possible Love will represent the country in the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards, scheduled for March next year. It is Lee Chang-dong's first feature in eight years, and the selection brings together two milestones at once: an Oscar submission and a Venice competition slot, with the film set to screen at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival next month.

For Lee, who has built one of Korean cinema's most deliberate filmographies, the gap since Burning (2018) has only sharpened the anticipation around this project. That film became the first Korean title to reach the Academy's longlist for the then-named Foreign Language Film category, and KOFIC cited that record, along with significant North American press interest, as part of its reasoning for selecting Possible Love this cycle.

What the selection committee said

A 15-member jury evaluated the submissions. In its statement, KOFIC described the film as exceptional in craft and directorial vision, singling out its mise-en-scène, the depth of its humanism, and what the committee called a layered rendering of character and relational complexity. Those are qualities consistently associated with Lee's work, from Poetry (2010) to Burning, and the committee appeared to be arguing that Possible Love sits comfortably in that lineage.

The film centers on two couples whose lives intersect through the making of a documentary. One couple is a laid-off worker and his wife; the other is a documentary filmmaker and her husband. As they collaborate, they confront the distances between their worlds and the desires neither had named. The cast is one of the strongest assembled for a Korean film in recent memory: Jeon Do-yeon plays Miok, with Sul Kyung-gu as her husband Hoseok; Jo In-sung plays Sangwoo, with Jo Yeo-jeong as his wife Yeji.

Possible Love is also Lee's first Netflix film, which carries its own implications for how the project will be positioned internationally. Netflix's awards infrastructure, built over several cycles, gives the film distribution reach that a conventional theatrical release would not, and the platform has demonstrated consistent willingness to support prestige campaigns for non-English titles.

How the Oscar process works from here

The Best International Feature Film category accepts one submission per country, all of which go into a common pool. AMPAS then narrows that pool to a longlist of ten films before selecting five nominees. The final nominees are announced in early next year; the ceremony itself is in March. Possible Love has not yet been nominated, and Lee has never had a film reach the final five in this category.

Last year, Park Chan-wook's There Is No Way to Handle It was South Korea's submission, which reflects how seriously Korean cinema has been competing for the slot in recent years.

On the festival side, Possible Love will screen in Venice's main competition from the 2nd to the 12th of next month and in the Special Presentations section at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival. Venice is the more significant marker for Lee personally: Oasis won the Special Jury Prize there in 2002, and returning to competition after 24 years puts the film in direct conversation with his earlier career. Whether awards season rewards it or not, the film arrives as an event.