Director Lee Chang-dong's new film "Possible Love" draws inspiration from a pivotal moment in South Korean labour history. The film, which won the grand jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, centres on a private equity firm's takeover of a company and explores themes of redundancy, capital and class conflict.
Lee traces the film's genesis to the 2009 Ssangyong Motors standoff, when workers staged a 77-day strike and factory occupation to protest layoffs affecting between 37 and 43 percent of the workforce. Riot police eventually broke up the occupation.
Speaking in an interview, Lee describes that event as having "fundamentally changed the Korean labour movement." He explains that before 2009, workers' rights were widely accepted in Korea. After the standoff, that shifted. "The basic rights of labourers changed; to the public, they couldn't be seen as more important than market profitability or corporate competitiveness," Lee says through an interpreter.
The film examines the fallout of that shift. Lee frames the work as part of a moral imperative. Telling stories of the disenfranchised, he suggests, is "our moral responsibility." He also describes the act of "fighting an impossible fight" as "the only way to reclaim dignity," signalling the film's thematic core.
"Possible Love" positions itself as a study of labour, capital and the human cost of corporate restructuring. By grounding the narrative in a documented historical event, Lee uses the Ssangyong case as a lens through which to examine how market logic has come to override worker protections in contemporary Korea.