The same film can go to Venice and cannot go to Cannes

Festival selection news usually reads as proof that a film was good enough.

But the same film can be welcome at one festival and ineligible at another. Not because the film changed — because the rulebooks differ.

On July 23 the Venice office announced twenty titles in the competition of its 83rd edition, and Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love is one of them. Netflix is distributing it.

At a glance

Two rows in that table do not sit together comfortably: a competition slot at one of the world's three biggest festivals, and a worldwide Netflix release two months later. A decade ago those two could not appear on the same line. At one festival they still cannot.

It begins with two couples and one documentary

The story turns on two marriages. Jeon Do-yeon and Sol Kyung-gu play a laid-off worker and his wife; Cho Yeo-jeong and Jo In-sung play a documentary director and her husband. The four are drawn together while a documentary is being made, and end up facing lives unlike their own and desires they had kept out of sight.

Lee Chang-dong made Secret Sunshine (2007), Poetry (2010) and Burning (2018). Jeon Do-yeon won Best Actress at Cannes for Secret Sunshine, which makes this a reunion nineteen years in the making. Cho Yeo-jeong is the mother from Parasite (2019), which is where most viewers outside Korea will know her face from.

The film is described as drawing on Dekalog, the ten-part series Krzysztof Kieślowski made for Polish television in 1988 — the Ten Commandments retold through the residents of one apartment estate. That reference tells you more than the poster does. It signals a film that watches ordinary people making choices, rather than one built around a single big event.

In the poster released so far, Jeon Do-yeon and Cho Yeo-jeong stand apart, facing each other, neither of them smiling.

Anyone can enter for 200 euros — there are only twenty-one slots

Getting a film in front of Venice is not a closed door. The procedure and the price are printed in the official regulations.

The last row is the point of the table. Two hundred euros does not buy a place; it buys a viewing. Whether the film then goes into one of twenty-one slots rests entirely with the festival, and this year twenty of them were filled.

That is the mirror image of the Grammys, which put every filed recording straight onto the ballot. There, not entering means nothing happens. Here, entering can also mean nothing happens.

One more clause is worth noticing: submissions stay strictly confidential until the programme is officially announced. So no list of rejected films exists anywhere.

At Cannes this film would not even have been eligible

But run the same film through the Cannes rulebook and the outcome flips.

Since 2018, Cannes has invited into competition only films that open in French cinemas. The trigger was the previous year. Bong Joon-ho's Okja and Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories reached the competition as Netflix titles, and French exhibitors objected to films competing without a theatrical release. Festival director Thierry Frémaux subsequently declared that Netflix films could not screen in the official selection.

Venice went the other way. In 2018 Alfonso Cuarón's Netflix film Roma won the Golden Lion there, and the festival has since been the more open of the two to streaming-backed work.

Compressed into a single comparison:

November 6 falls after the September premiere, so Venice's rules are untouched. At Cannes the film would never reach the point where anyone judges whether it is any good.

The rulebook decided this, not the film.

The 45 days between cinema and Netflix are a distribution choice, not a rule

That gap used to be far longer. The convention was to run a film in cinemas until it was exhausted before moving it to any other window, and some countries still fix the interval in law.

Reading Possible Love's 45 days purely as a change in convention only gets you halfway, though. What the Venice regulations demand is not a length but an order: festival first, online second. Keep that order and the regulations have nothing to say about whether the gap is 45 days or six months. The number was set by a distributor, not by a festival.

Netflix titles opening in cinemas first is not new either. In 2017 Okja was released in Korean cinemas and on Netflix the same day, and the three big multiplex chains refused to screen it, so it ended up in independent theatres. French exhibitors were not the only ones objecting.

How many people a film reaches is also counted differently by window. Korean theatrical performance is reported in admissions, and what that number actually counts does not sit neatly beside a streaming figure.

What this means where you are

Three dates surround this film, and exactly one of them is certain for you.

The closing ceremony runs in the local evening, so across Asia the results arrive overnight. Sleeping on it is the sensible plan.

There is little reason to wait on the cinema question. Korean art-house films rarely get a regular release across Southeast Asia; they tend to pass through as festival or cinematheque screenings and disappear. November 6, by contrast, is a confirmed worldwide date. Marking it in a calendar beats spending weeks checking whether a local screen picks the film up.

One more thing. Because the festival premiere comes before both the cinema and the streaming release, reviews and plot descriptions start pouring out in early September. If you want to go in knowing nothing, that is a two-month stretch to avoid — September 2 to November 6. For a Venice competition title, that is not a short time to stay off the internet.

Read next

• What BTS left empty is not a trophy but a form — the shape of an award you have to file for
• The AAA has no form to file — when the organiser writes the shortlist
• What Korean box office admissions count — reading theatrical numbers
• A map of Korean TV channels — who makes what, and where it goes out

Sources

• La Biennale di Venezia — Venezia 83 Regulations
• Herald Business (Korean) — Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love enters Venice competition, 12th Korean film to do so
• Dailian (Korean) — Venice embraces Netflix: Possible Love competes for the Golden Lion
• YTN (Korean) — Possible Love opens September 23, Netflix in November
• Herald Business (Korean) — 'No Netflix allowed': how Cannes holds the line