Venice Film Festival 2026: Lee Chang-dong's Return and the Ends of Slow Cinema
Lee Chang-dong returns to Venice with Possible Love, his first feature since Burning — and his first backed by Netflix. On patience, distribution, and what slow cinema is for.
Eight years after Burning, Lee Chang-dong has a new film. Possible Love premieres in competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, which runs on the Lido from 2 to 12 September 2026, one of twenty features in the Golden Lion competition, all world premieres. It is Lee’s first appearance at Venice since 2002, when Oasis took him the Silver Lion for best direction.
The film is a melodrama. It stars Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu opposite Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong. And it is financed by Netflix.
That last fact is the one worth thinking about, and not for the reason it is usually raised.
The waiting is the work
Lee has made six features in twenty-nine years. The gaps are not accidents of financing or the residue of failed projects; they correspond to a working method in which a film is not begun until it is understood. He spent four years as South Korea’s Minister of Culture and Tourism in the middle of his career. Poetry came six years after Secret Sunshine. Burning came eight years after Poetry. Possible Love comes eight years after Burning.
There is a critical habit of describing this as scarcity — the auteur who withholds — which gets the causality backwards and makes a virtue of what is more accurately a constraint. Films made this slowly are films that almost do not get made. The gaps are where the financing did not exist.
Which is where the Netflix involvement stops being a scandal and starts being an answer to a question the scarcity framing never asks: who was going to pay for this?
What “slow cinema” actually names
The phrase in this article’s title deserves scrutiny, because Lee has a complicated relationship to it. Slow cinema as a critical category — the durational tradition running through Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa, Tsai Ming-liang, Lav Diaz — is defined by the long take, the refusal of conventional narrative propulsion, and a demand on the viewer’s patience that is the film’s actual subject.
Lee does not work that way. Burning is a thriller with a body count and a genuine mystery. Secret Sunshine is a devastating narrative about grief that moves through recognisable dramatic incident. Oasis is a love story. His films are patient rather than slow: they take the time an emotional situation requires and they cut when the scene is finished. The rhythm is closer to the great tradition of humanist melodrama — Naruse, early Kore-eda — than to Tarr.
What Lee shares with the durational directors is not technique but economics. Both depend on a distribution ecology in which a film can find its audience slowly, over years, through festivals and repertory and the accumulating authority of critical consensus. That ecology is what has been dismantled, and it is dismantling equally for the seven-hour Filipino epic and the two-and-a-half-hour Korean melodrama.
The tension the film sits inside
A streamer’s economics are the inverse of a patient film’s. Netflix acquires attention in the first fortnight; a Lee Chang-dong film accrues meaning over a decade. Burning was not fully absorbed by critics on its Cannes premiere — its reputation grew, and is still growing, as people rewatched it and argued about what happens at the end.
So the honest version of the streaming question is not “has Lee sold out.” It is: does a distribution model built on immediate engagement metrics have any mechanism for a film whose value is realised over ten years? The evidence is genuinely mixed. Netflix has funded Scorsese, Cuarón and Baumbach films that no studio would have made, and it has also buried films it financed under an interface that surfaces them for a week and then does not.
The optimistic reading is that a streamer’s willingness to fund the film at all is the thing the old ecology stopped doing. The pessimistic reading is that a film financed for a library will be watched like a library item — half-attended, on a laptop, in three sittings. Both can be true of the same film depending on who is watching.
Venice as the venue for this argument
There is a reason this premiere is at Venice rather than Cannes, where Lee has premiered his last three features. Cannes has fought a long and public battle over streaming-financed films in competition, tied to French theatrical release windows. Venice has been comfortable with streamer-backed work in competition for the better part of a decade, and has been rewarded with a run of premieres that made it the more consequential festival for a stretch of years.
That institutional difference is not incidental to Possible Love appearing on the Lido. It is close to the whole explanation, and it makes Venice 2026 a reasonable place to ask what the festival system is now for. If festivals were once the mechanism by which difficult films reached distribution, and distribution is now a platform decision made before the film is shot, then the festival’s function has quietly changed from gatekeeper to press event.
The consolation — and it is a real one — is that for eleven days on the Lido, twenty films will be shown to audiences sitting in the dark with no ability to pause. Whatever happens to Possible Love afterwards, it will have been seen once the way it was made to be seen.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs 2–12 September 2026. The full competition lineup is at labiennale.org.
Sources: La Biennale di Venezia, Venezia 83 Competition · The Hollywood Reporter, “Venice Film Festival unveils 2026 lineup” · IndieWire, “Venice Film Festival Reveals Full 2026 Lineup”