A Venice Winner Returns to the Oscar Race, and Korea's Class War Reaches Italy

The Guardian has published an interview with the South Korean director Lee Chang-dong on the occasion of his new film, a study of labour, capital and the fallout of redundancy that, according to the paper, won the grand jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. The interview, published on 23 October, presents the film as a searing Oscar contender and quotes the director on the moral duty of telling stories of the disenfranchised.

The premise the Guardian sets out is a familiar one to Italian audiences: a private equity firm sets its sights on a company, and the workers beneath it absorb the consequences. Lee describes fighting an impossible fight as the only way to reclaim dignity, a formulation the paper carries in its headline.

For the Cultura desk the interest lies in the festival circuit rather than the box office. Venice is the point at which a Korean art-house director's film enters the English-language conversation as a prize-winner, and the Guardian's framing — class warfare, redundancy, dignity — is the frame through which foreign readers will now approach it.

The Venice award matters because it is one of the few moments when the Lido's juries set the terms for a film's international life. A grand jury prize does not guarantee distribution, but it gives reviewers abroad a reason to write about a director whose work might otherwise circulate only among festival regulars. The Guardian's decision to interview Lee at length, rather than review him briefly, is evidence of that effect.

The comparison the paper invites is with the tradition of social-realist cinema that Italian audiences know well. Lee's subject — a firm taken over, a workforce made redundant, the question of what dignity remains — is the territory of the postwar Italian screen as much as of contemporary Korean film. The Guardian does not make that comparison, and this dispatch does not attribute it to the paper; it is offered as context for readers of La Veduta.

What the wire supports is narrower than a full account of the film's reception. The Guardian reports the Venice prize and the director's remarks on moral responsibility; it does not, in the material available, give the film's Italian release date, its Italian distributor, or any Italian critical reaction. Readers should treat the awards-season framing as the Guardian's, and wait for the film's own arrival before judging the claim.

The Oscar contender label is the paper's, and it belongs to the speculation that surrounds every Venice prize-winner in the autumn. Whether the film converts the Lido's endorsement into a nomination is a question the coming months will answer; what is already clear is that a director working in Korean, on a subject drawn from the mechanics of finance capital, has been handed the most valuable currency the festival circuit offers — the attention of the English-language press.