Where to begin with Lee Chang-dong  

Though sometimes overshadowed by international darlings Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong has quietly built a name for himself as one of South Korea’s finest filmmakers. He’s not as flashy as some of his Korean New Wave cohorts, who are famous for stitching together different genres for their own idiosyncratic ends, but what he lacks in obvious showmanship he more than makes up for in formal nuance, attention to detail, and mastery of the emotional gut punch.

Lee’s films are known for their literary focus on character and slowly revealed plotting. Having first cut his teeth as a literature teacher, then a novelist, it wasn’t until Lee was in his forties that he turned his hand to directing, quickly becoming a key figure in the then-emerging New Wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was born into a leftist family in 1954 but raised in conservative Daegu, and his films brim with fury for institutions of power and compassion for those on the lower rungs of South Korean society, following characters who have no choice but to beat on against life’s unexplainably cruel tragedies. 

There’s no better time than the present to begin familiarising yourself with Lee’s work. His long-awaited latest, Possible Love (2026), recently snagged the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, screens at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, and is making its way to UK cinemas on 23 October. But for a filmmaker with so few films under his belt (seven features in three decades), it’s surprisingly tricky to gauge where in his near-airtight filmography to dive into first.

Burning (2018) remains the cleanest entry point into Lee’s oeuvre – a gateway for newcomers to Korean arthouse film without sacrificing any of the thematic density and meticulous character work for which he has become known. An adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story ‘Barn Burning’, the film follows Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), an aspiring novelist struggling to eke out a living in Seoul. He soon reconnects with free-spirited former classmate Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), and the two strike up an intimate friendship. However, Hae-mi soon introduces Jong-su to Ben (Hollywood A-lister Steven Yeun – an inspired casting), a wealthy and enigmatic young man she met abroad. As the three fall into an uneasy orbit, Jong-su becomes increasingly suspicious of Ben, particularly after Hae-mi mysteriously disappears and Ben casually reveals an unsettling hobby of his own.

In this slow-burn thriller about the yearning and anxieties of South Korea’s precarious twentysomethings, Lee weaponises the unreliable POV of our increasingly paranoid protagonist to craft a nuanced portrait of class tension that reaches its boiling point in the film’s unforgettable final sequence. Widely regarded as one of the greatest films of its decade, it marked a triumphant return for Lee, who had spent part of an eight-year hiatus blacklisted by the South Korean government for his left-leaning political views and perceived opposition to the country’s conservative administrations. 

According to Lee himself, the extended absence gave him time to reflect on what kind of stories he wanted to tell, with Burning the result of his renewed clarity. The film also contains one of cinema’s most mesmerising needledrops: an intoxicated Hae-mi casting out her existential woes by dancing half-naked to ‘Générique’ – a cut from Miles Davis’s score for Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold (1958) – as the sun sinks into the horizon beyond her.

Lee’s preoccupation with the psychological decay of ordinary people under social repression first came into full focus in his second feature Peppermint Candy (1999), which opens with the suicide of the erratically depressed Yeong-ho (Sul Kyung-gu), before moving backwards through the key moments that led him to take his own life. Lee employs this structure to indict the most turbulent chapters of modern Korean history – the Gwangju Uprising chief among them – using Yeong-ho’s descent from idealistic young soldier to broken, embittered man as a vessel for the nation’s own repressed guilt.

Possible Love, their third collaboration, again finds Sul playing a man only barely keeping a lid on his volcanic, futile fury at the world, this time as Ho-seok, a laid-off worker recovering from a brutal beating by government officers during a union sit-in. In the hopes of a therapeutic breakthrough, his wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) accepts an offer from documentarian Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) to let their family become the subject of her latest film. Originally conceived as part of a project involving various filmmakers remaking episodes of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1989), the film sees Lee planting seeds across two unhurried acts only to watch them sprout violently in the third – evidence of just how confident his command of narrative tension has grown since Peppermint Candy. 

The performance at its heart, and the one that has dominated conversation since the film premiered at Venice last month, belongs to Jeon Do-yeon, who, as Mi-ok, lets buried wounds seep through a sunny exterior as she navigates Ho-seok’s internalised anguish, a burgeoning friendship with the wealthy Ye-ji and a wordless attraction to Ye-ji’s businessman husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).

Famous for her raw portrayals of women unravelling under the strain of profound trauma, Jeon is at her most formidable in Lee’s hands. Her first collaboration with the director, Secret Sunshine (2007), which made her the first Korean to win Best Actress at Cannes, casts her as a mother wrestling with religion in the aftermath of her son’s kidnapping and subsequent murder. Lee is merciless here, rejecting audience catharsis almost out of respect for his protagonist, whose grief is bound eternally to her bones. An unflinching reckoning with the limits of faith and forgiveness, it’s a devastating watch, but essential viewing if you want to dive straight to the core of Lee’s cinema and understand why his reunion with Jeon in Possible Love is so monumental.

On either end of Secret Sunshine are Oasis (2002) – Lee’s first Silver Lion winner – and Poetry (2010), which see him deep in the throes of his filmic evolution, arguably taking on his thorniest subject matter to date. Both turn his gaze towards those society has pushed to the margins: Oasis tackling a complicated love story between an ex-convict with a developmental disability and a woman with severe cerebral palsy, and Poetry, a tale of a dementia patient who takes a poetry class to come to terms with her mortality. Their uncomfortable subject matter makes them demanding places to first meet Lee’s work, but together they bookend a crucial period that saw him cement his standing as one of Korean cinema’s foremost dramatists.

Like many first films from soon-to-be masters, Lee’s debut Green Fish (1997) is his most conventional, a rough-around-the-edges promise of things to come rather than a true announcement of greatness. It follows Mak-dong (Han Suk-kyu), an ex-soldier returning to his rapidly gentrifying hometown outside Seoul, who is recruited by a local gangster outfit and falls in love with Mi-ae (Shim Hye-jin), the mistress of the gang’s boss. Riding a boom in New Wave gangster pictures alongside Kim Sung-su’s Beat and Song Neung-han’s No. 3 (both 1997), and becoming one of the top 10 films at the South Korean box office in its year, Green Fish remains worth watching to see the novelist-turned-filmmaker’s style in embryo.

Possible Love is currently screening at the 70th BFI London Film Festival, ahead of a UK cinema release on 23 October.