‘Fighting an impossible fight is the only way to reclaim dignity’: Lee Chang-dong on class warfare and his searing Oscar contender

The auteur’s new film – a study of labour, capital and the fallout of redundancy – won the grand jury prize at Venice. Telling tales of the disenfranchised is ‘our moral responsibility’, he says A quintessential 21st-century horror story: a private equity firm has set its sights

The auteur’s new film – a study of labour, capital and the fallout of redundancy – won the grand jury prize at Venice. Telling tales of the disenfranchised is ‘our moral responsibility’, he says A quintessential 21st-century horror story: a private equity firm has set its sights on your company. That’s the premise behind director Lee Chang-dong’s new film, Possible Love, and the idea for it first came more than a decade ago, when mass layoffs resulted in a standoff that “fundamentally changed the Korean labour movement”.

In 2009, workers at Ssangyong Motors company protested against plans to lay off between 37 and 43% of the workforce, staging a historic 77-day strike and occupation of the factory that was eventually broken up by riot police. “Until that point in time in Korea, labourers’ rights were widely accepted,” Lee says, speaking through an interpreter in a central London hotel; “however, afterwards, the basic rights of labourers changed; to the public, they couldn’t be seen as more important than market profitability or corporate competitiveness.” Continue reading...