“Am I worthy of telling their story?”: Lee Chang-Dong on Possible Love And the Responsibility of Storytelling

Lee Chang-Dong has spent his career chronicling characters caught in the midst of despair. But his latest film, Possible Love, presented the filmmaker with a different kind of challenge.

In 2009, a South Korean car manufacturer named SsangYong Motors announced that 2,646 workers (who made up 43% of its workforce) would be laid off. To protest the redundancies, SsangYong’s workers went on strike – occupying the rooftop of one of the company’s plants to fight for their jobs. After 77 days of protesting, the state police violently suppressed the strike. Videos of the conflict, which were broadcast on South Korean news networks, show workers huddled together on a sage-green roof – sheltering from tear gas being dropped by helicopter – before they are chased and bludgeoned by police in riot gear.

After the protest was inhibited, union members were ordered to pay $9 million in fines for economic damage and the strikers were blacklisted from finding employment at other major Korean companies. In the two decades that followed, over 30 SsangYong workers died by suicide. One worker wrote to his wife: “I’m sorry you had to suffer because of your incompetent husband. Even at the end, all I can give you is debt.”

In his new film, Possible Love, Lee Chang-Dong reimagines this same rooftop scene. In Lee’s world, the company is not called SsangYong, but SP Heavy Industries, but the strike and aftermath remain the same. Told in Lee’s signature, novelistic style, the film follows two couples: a worker and his wife who are dealing with the aftermath of the protests, and a documentary filmmaker who chronicles the couple’s struggle alongside her husband.  

Few filmmakers have captured the contradictions of South Korean society quite like Lee. The novelist-turned-filmmaker has become one of the country’s most respected directors, earning international recognition for films including Peppermint Candy, Oasis, Secret Sunshine, and Poetry.  His previous 2018 film, Burning, cemented his status as one of contemporary filmmaking's most distinctive voices.

For Lee, depicting characters who are in the midst of despair is no new task. Across his filmography, he’s drawn characters who have seen their children murdered, who have faced physical violence, and whose bodies deteriorate from ageing and illness. Yet making Possible Love weighed on him more than any other film. Not only is Possible Love a story about labour – a theme that stretches back in Lee’s work as far back as 1995’s A Single Spark – but it is a story that has real-world victims, ones who are alive to this day.

For Lee, this raised a question that would follow him through the film’s making: Am I worthy to tell this story? In conversation with Man About Town, he discusses the responsibility of creating a story that is based on real-world events, the erosion of workers’ rights, and why South Koreans have produced some of our greatest cinematic capitalist critiques.

When you’ve talked about how you approached Possible Love, one question you’ve said you asked yourself was: Am I worthy enough to tell this story? What does worthiness mean to you?

When we tell the story of others, especially when we talk about their pain, I feel that there are questions that we cannot escape. How capable am I of telling their story truthfully? Even if I put in the effort to tell their story from their perspective, how honest can I really be?

Possible Love started from the story of actual workers who had been laid off in Korea. At the time, the level of pain and the trauma was truly intense. In fact, it was so intense that it led to over 30 people – both those that were laid off and their family members – taking their own lives. That's how grave the collective trauma was.

As I got closer to this story, I couldn't help but ask: Am I worthy of telling their story? I think that this is a question that all filmmakers, or any storytellers that deal with the pain of others, cannot avoid.

Why did the events surrounding the SsangYong workers feel like such a significant turning point in Korean society? And what did they mean to you personally?

The overall process of these workers being laid off – resisting through a sit-in strike and then being met with a forced crackdown from the authorities – was very shocking. It was not only the physical conflict itself, but the reason that it felt more problematic to me – as well as the people who were going through it – was because the rights of the labourers were no longer protected. It was almost as if that event was a public declaration that the Korean people had come to a societal agreement that there was now something that was even more important than the value of labour, which had previously been protected by both societal agreement and by the law itself.

What took precedence over the value of labour was, of course, profitability. It was the logic of capitalism. At the time, I thought that not only was this event going to gravely transform the Korean labour movement, but I also felt that we were witnessing a new chapter in our lives – we had entered an era of market reason and profits becoming more important than the value of workers. This was something I wanted to share with audiences through cinema. What had hurt the minds and hearts of the labourers was that the values that once protected them were no more.

The issue of labour is only becoming worse, especially with the emergence of AI. We are now living in an era where the very concept of labour itself is becoming quite muddled.

Work is often discussed as something we're forced to participate in under capitalism, but it’s naïve to think that it doesn’t give people a sense of identity, purpose and belonging. How do you think work shapes our sense of self?

Since the beginning of human history, we have had no other choice but to work – especially in modern times. The space of work was really where your human connections and relationships began – whether it was with your spouse or with the wider society – and the kind of work you did was at the heart of your life. It has been that way for quite some time.

When we are stripped of opportunities to work, that can lead to a crisis of our inner worlds. As Ho-seok [the laid-off worker in Possible Love] says, that leads to people feeling empty - he explains it by saying that he feels like a soulless phantom. We say that we now live in an AI era. We know that AI has no sense of self, so in a way you could say that it's almost as if we are slowly resembling AI.  

In Ho-seok’s younger scenes, he pursues Mi-ok at her factory. He takes her to the waterfront, and they look at the full moon. In that scene he says to her: My heart is just like that moon. That is to say, he feels that full. However, later he says that he feels completely empty. And I think that might be how people feel when they have lost the value and opportunity of labour, because there is a sense of emptiness and anger that stems from that. I feel like that is something that many people can resonate with and relate to today.

In the film, there’s a pointed gap between the work of labourers and the work of the documentary filmmaker, which you’ve likened to your own work. Do you consider yourself to be a worker?

I don't think that I see myself as a worker. The work of filmmaking is indeed very intense, almost close to heavy manual labour if you will, but I don't think of myself as a labourer. Does that mean I think of my work as creating art? I don't really think I define it that way either. I would say that the work that I do is delivering the story of others. I think it's almost my fate that I don't truly belong in any category.

And I think that's very similar to how Lee Ye-ji [the documentary filmmaker] is portrayed. Ye-ji is the wife of a very wealthy man. It seems that she belongs in that world [of wealth], but she is somebody who tries to tell the story of the lives of these laid off workers. You might see her as not truly belonging to either of those worlds - and I think that's how I see where I am.

In the 1980s, you participated in the protests against Chun Doo-hwan's military dictatorship. How did that experience of protesting and collective resistance inform your approach to filmmaking?

In the 1980s, Korea was under military rule and everyone – students, academics, writers, artists – had to resist and fight against this reality. Everything that we did in our daily lives was really rooted in that reality. Naturally, I took part in it and wanted to be a part of that movement.

I’m sure this is true for other countries as well, but especially for Korea, writers and artists from those times had a very strong and acute sense of moral responsibility. You believed your role necessitated that you had to speak up and highlight the ironies of that reality.

That's my background. While a lot of time has passed and the world has changed very dramatically, I feel that the way I approach things and how I see the world hasn't changed much since then.

Possible Love has been compared frequently to Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. I think those comparisons are maybe a little too neat, but all three are films that have found audiences globally, and each focuses on class and labour. Why do you think these stories have resonated globally? Why do you think these stories are being told so well in South Korea?  

I believe that it’s because the issues that these films deal with – whether they be about labour or about class – are issues that many people around the world feel are very close to their lives.

As for why Korean filmmakers are more sensitive in telling these stories, I do think that some part of it has to do with Korea's historical situation. There are many issues that we experience everywhere around the world - whether they are inequality, capitalism or the fact that we are seeing the value of labour disappear – but Korean society has gone through these in such an intense and condensed way, if you will.  Korea, compared to any other country around the world, experienced development and growth in such a rapid period of time – and therefore experienced the many paradoxes that come from such dramatic change in such a concentrated and condensed manner.

Because of that, Korean filmmakers might be more sensitive to these transformations and paradoxes - and perhaps that is why they are able to tell these stories in a more convincing way.