// THE VERGE — MODA & SOCIETÀ
Lee Chang Dong ponders the ethics of the camera
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In Possible Love, the director of Burning tackles labor struggle, human connection, and the nature of capturing others on film.
In Possible Love, the director of Burning tackles labor struggle, human connection, and the nature of capturing others on film.
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Lee Chang Dong’s seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff – 2,600 employees – after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor or religion or compressed modernity, that uniquely Korean affliction, without feeling didactic.
A different kind of movie would have captured the heat of that labor struggle. Possible Love picks up with the characters in the aftermath, a murkier time that defies easy understanding. The film opens with an epigraph: “Thou shall not covet.” What follows is a movie about characters who covet. They covet each other’s job, designer clothes, spouses, and positionality. Mi-ok (Jeon Do-Yeon) is the long-suffering wife of Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), her laid-off husband. At a funeral of a colleague who died by suicide, Mi-ok and Ho-seok meet another couple, documentary filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her rich husband, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung). And off we go.
The Verge spoke with Lee during his trip to New York about how he arrived at his politics, porousness between people, the properties of the camera, and what it is like to work with Netflix. The interview was conducted in Korean and translated into English.
I am also from Daegu. I wonder how this fact shaped you? And more broadly, to whom or what do you owe your political education?