Lee Chang-dong's films are finally getting a proper global home. Netflix will expand his catalogue to viewers everywhere, a rollout timed to the Silver Lion, Venice's Grand Jury Prize, that his new film Possible Love picked up over the weekend.

It's Lee's first film in eight years. And the streaming plan around it is unusually staggered even by Netflix's standards.

The theatrical run comes first

Possible Love opens in South Korean theatres on September 23. Australia and New Zealand follow on October 22, with the UK, Japan, the US and Canada getting it a day later on October 23. Only after that does Netflix put it up globally, on November 6.

The film centres on two couples whose lives tangle together during the making of a documentary. One half is a laid-off worker and his wife. The other is a documentary filmmaker and her husband. According to Variety, the film draws out desires and struggles each pair had been sitting on quietly. Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong lead the cast. South Korea has also picked it as its submission for Best International Feature at the 99th Academy Awards.

The back catalogue is arriving in pieces

Green Fish and Secret Sunshine have already been streaming since late August in Italy, the UK, France, Australia and New Zealand. Peppermint Candy and Oasis landed in Italy and Spain on September 4. Poetry and Burning are next, headed for Japan, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, per both Variety and Deadline. Timing shifts country to country, and subtitle options can run up to six languages, Korean included.

For a director whose films have mostly lived on festival prints and scattered regional discs, that's a real shift. Lee debuted with Green Fish in 1997 and has spent three decades building a filmography that keeps winning at the top level. Oasis got him the directing prize at Venice in 2002. Poetry took the screenplay award at Cannes in 2010. And most recently, at Toronto's 51st edition, he became the first Korean filmmaker to receive the festival's Ebert Director Award.

What's notable here isn't just one win. It's that Netflix appears to be using Possible Love's Venice moment to finally make Lee's entire body of work findable in one place, rather than treating it as a single festival title with a limited window. Whether that logic extends to other festival auteurs whose catalogues sit scattered across regional libraries is the bigger question this rollout raises.

For now, the clock runs to November 6, when Possible Love hits Netflix everywhere at once and the rest of Lee's films sit waiting in whichever corner of the library they've landed in.