Lee Chang-dong's Heartbeat is on Netflix today

Lee Chang-dong's first short film, Heartbeat, is on Netflix today. It runs 28 minutes, which means you can watch it before Friday, when his Venice winner Possible Love arrives on the same service, or before you dig into Burning.

Lee is the Korean director of Poetry, which won best screenplay at Cannes, and Burning, the first Korean film to reach the Oscar international shortlist. He started as a novelist, made features that usually ask for a full evening, and spent a stretch in the early 2000s as culture minister. Heartbeat is shorter. An eight-year-old leaves school and runs home.

The boy is Cheol, played by Kim Geon-u. His mother, Jeon Do-yeon, lives with depression. His father, voiced by Sul Kyung-gu, is staging a protest on a tower crane. When Cheol calls from class and she does not pick up, he tells the teacher he needs the bathroom and takes off. The camera stays on his face the whole way. Lee wrote the short with Oh Jung-mi. At the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2022, he said it looks like one continuous shot, though they filmed it across about seven days and joined the pieces with computer graphics. He wanted Cheol's fear to hold, not a camera stunt.

The World Health Organization and the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation asked directors to make films about depression. Lee said he was among the last to agree and the first to finish. He shot in late 2020 and wrapped early in 2021. For years he had been circling a story about a laid-off worker's family. The commission gave him a reason to tell that story through the boy. Heartbeat premiered at Jeonju on April 30, 2022, and never got a normal theatrical run. Jeon and Sul play the parents again in Possible Love, which took the Silver Lion at Venice. Netflix has also been opening more of Lee's older films in more countries, so Secret Sunshine, Poetry, and Burning are nearby if you keep going.

Possible Love lands on Netflix on November 6. Heartbeat is the 28 minutes you can watch first.