‘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 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…