Netflix has bought itself a Korean Oscar campaign
Lee Chang-dong's first film in eight years premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday evening, carrying South Korea's official Academy Award submission and Netflix's money behind it.
Possible Love (Ganeunghan sarang) reaches Korean cinemas on 23 September, seven days inside the Academy's window. Its rules for the 99th awards require an international feature to open theatrically in its country of origin no later than 30 September 2026.
The Korean Film Council selected the film on 25 August. In the account Screen Daily published of the committee's reasoning, the awards campaign Netflix intended to mount sat alongside the film's craft among the reasons it was chosen.
"Possible Love" premiered at Venice on Sunday. It is South Korea's official submission, and the company that financed it is the company campaigning for it.
Netflix produced and fully financed the film, the Hollywood Reporter said, and has positioned it among its leading awards titles of the year. The financier and the distributor are the same company, and the country's entry was picked partly on that company's capacity to spend.
Sunday was the campaign's first public test. The film played the Sala Grande to a standing ovation, and the trade reviews that appeared as the screening began were close to unanimous.
Lee reunited with Jeon Do-yeon, who won the best actress prize at Cannes in 2007 for Secret Sunshine, and Sul Kyung-gu, who led his Peppermint Candy and Oasis. It is his first feature since Burning in 2018.
The film opens with a title card reading "Thou shalt not covet", the South China Morning Post said in its review, nodding to the tenth part of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog. It sets two marriages of unequal wealth against each other.
The release calendar is built backwards from the rules. Korean cinemas on 23 September; cinemas in the United States and selected territories on 23 October; Netflix worldwide on 6 November, with Toronto and New York festival stops in between.
None of that is unusual on its own. Every serious international entry is campaigned by somebody, and Korean committees have selected films with foreign distributors before. The theatrical run in Korea, though, exists largely to satisfy a clause, and it lasts a month before the film becomes a streaming release everywhere.
Netflix opened this year's festival with Danny Boyle's Ink, about the rise of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid business, according to Variety. It has now placed two titles at the front of the world's oldest film festival in a single week.
Speaking to Variety before the premiere, Lee said the title poses a question: "what is love that is possible?"
SOURCES (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)RELATED ARTICLES
LATEST
MORE IN:
Asia-Pacific overtook every region for streaming series orders in the first half of 2026, with unusually high commission counts in Taiwan and the Philippines.