Lee Chang-dong took the only prize Asia won at Venice
Lee Chang-dong won the Silver Lion, the Grand Jury Prize, at the close of the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, for a film that reaches Netflix on 6 November.
Possible Love (Ga-neung-han Sa-rang) was the only Asian title among the competition's prizes. Hirokazu Kore-eda's Look Back and Shinya Tsukamoto's Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, the region's other entries, left empty-handed.
The Golden Lion went to May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown, set in Denmark in the summer of 1945, whose star Mathilde Arcel also took the Volpi Cup. Jeon Do-yeon had been tipped for that prize.
"Possible Love" won the Silver Lion on Saturday. The two Japanese films in competition went home with nothing.
Accepting his award, Lee said cinema has to reckon with a period in which the meaning of work is draining away and the connections between people are being severed, and that he took the prize as encouragement to keep asking what film is for.
The film he said it about is a film about work. Jeon plays a paper-factory worker who becomes the subject of a wealthier documentary maker's project, and the distance between the two households is the whole picture.
Korea named Possible Love its Academy Awards entry on 25 August, for reasons that included the campaign its financier intended to run.
Saturday's prize does not alter that. The Academy's rules for the 99th awards designate six festivals whose top award opens a second route into the international feature category, and at Venice that award is the Golden Lion.
PHOTO: The Herald BUSINEE
Director Lee Chang-dong of "Possible Love" poses for a photo after receiving the Grand Jury Prize (Silver Lion) at the closing ceremony of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on Saturday (local time). [EPA]
Elsewhere in the competition, Ilya Khrzhanovsky won the Silver Lion for direction for DAU, two decades in the making, and the Gaza documentary NAZA, added to the lineup late, took the Special Jury Prize.
Lee thanked his producer from the stage, saying he had "to put up with drinking every single day", and apologised to him.
Venice's official prize list gives the film's nationality as South Korea and the United States.
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Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love won the Silver Lion at Venice on Saturday, the only prize an Asian film took from this year's competition.