Min Sook Lee’s “There Are No Words”
Min Sook Lee and her mother, Song Ji Lee (July 16, 1980). Photo credit: Min Sook Lee's family photo
What is there to say about an autobiographical documentary titled There Are No Words? I recognized this irony after requesting an interview with the director Min Sook Lee who was 12 years old when her mother took her life by suicide, leaving her alone with a father who carries a violent past. No one talked about what happened, and Lee began to distrust her memory. In our interview, she said she always wanted to make this film but didn’t know how to approach it. With her father aging and his heightened vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lee decided it was time to dig into the past and discover who her mother really was.
Min Sook Lee was born in South Korea and immigrated to Canada when she was three years old, growing up in downtown Toronto and working in her family’s variety store. It was there, in their store, where her mother went up to the roof to escape her tortured reality—something Lee only learned through countless hours interviewing her father, a former intelligence officer for South Korea. Lee returns to her hometown, Hwasun, where relatives and former neighbors tell stories of Lee’s mother, Song Ji Lee, what she was like growing up and how she met her husband. There are also intense, intimate conversations with her childhood friend who was there the day her mother died.
By piecing other people’s memories together, Lee discovers a fierceness to her mother she never knew—the ”boss bitch” working at the bus depot in Hwasun and “having the personality of a man,” later becoming a wife for her unborn daughter and fulfilling her dream to move to Canada. Lee’s father, who drank too much and beat people for a living, “went missing” in Korea and emigrated with his new family, but that didn’t change the family dynamic. Lee says she and her father never had a close relationship, and now remain in each other’s lives out of the personal duty to care for one’s aging parents, which became the impetus for Lee making the film.
Min Sook Lee. Photo credit: Elana Emer
Lee says there were times she was afraid to make this documentary—these conversations are happening for the first time, reopening wounds and trauma of her mother. With her father reaching his 90s, Lee didn’t want to be alone in remembering her mother: “There is one person on the planet who knows this beautiful person, and he will take her with him.” The prospect of losing the strongest connection to her mother gave Lee the drive she needed to complete the film. She also thanks her amazing team for helping her document and retell her narrative on screen.
There Are No Words is emotionally striking because it balances personal grief with the need to remember and tell stories of the past that will inform the present and future we build—how a fascist dictatorship descends upon the private relationships of its subjects and fosters generational trauma. When Lee’s father saw the film he thought she had been gentle with him, offering some recognition of shame in his life’s actions. He also said, “I didn’t know it mattered so much to you.”
Imagine entering your teenage years after the tragic loss of your mother that continues to go undiscussed for 40 years until you start asking questions. There Are No Words is Min Sook Lee’s ninth documentary, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2025, and received an honourable mention for Best Canadian Feature Film at the festival’s award ceremony. The film will be showcased at the Windsor International Film Festival (Oct. 23 to Nov. 2), and more screenings are to be announced by the National Film Board of Canada (check back for more updates).