Min Sook Lee’s ‘There Are No Words’ Seeks Truth Amid Secrets And Silence

Min Sook Lee is a documentary filmmaker with three decades of experience exploring topics of social justice. She covered the harsh working conditions experienced by migrant workers in El Contrato (2003), police corruption scandals in Hogtown: The Politics of Policing (2005), and the tragic separation of families mandated by the end of the Korean War in Tiger Spirit (2008). Yet her most recent film, the documentary There Are No Words (2025) was in her words, “the most intense, most creatively immersive, terrifying film to make.”

There Are No Words was a very personal project for the Korean Canadian filmmaker, as it seeks to know what led to her mother’s suicide 40 years ago. Although that death shaped Lee’s life and priorities, the facts surrounding it remained elusive, shrouded in silence and secrets.

“There are so many unspoken tensions and untold stories in my family, like every family,” said Lee. “But it’s complicated because of migration, because of language, because of intergenerational trauma. So, the story is really thick with silence. The film allowed me to have a conversation that I probably would be unable to do without the framework of a film. I’ve been making films for almost 30 years. So there’s a process that makes me feel very insulated, protected.”

Lee interviewed family and friends, most often her nonagenarian father, to find out who her mother was and what prompted her death. Her father, she admits, is an unreliable witness, often rewriting personal history. He was also an unreliable husband, drinking and seeing other women, while her mother worked the counter of their store, as well as caring for their children. He forbade her from even talking to other men.

Lee remembers her mother as shy, reserved and quiet, but it turns out she wasn’t always that way. Through her interviews the filmmaker learns her mom was once outspoken, friendly and confident, a resilient survivor, who faced endless hardships. Lee’s mother was Korean born in Japan, shortly after the Kanto earthquake and the massacre of Koreans in Nagasaki.

“She was able to leave just before the bomb was dropped,” said Lee. “Koreans who lived in Japan during the colonial times had a very, very difficult oppressed life. So from the get-go she faced challenges as a colonial subject and as a woman. Her father died when she was young. So, she had no patriarchal protector. Women in Korean society until quite recently were not even legitimate citizens unless they were attached to a man either as their father or as their husband in terms of their registration, in terms of their ID.”

Lee’s mother worked odd jobs to help provide for her siblings.

“By the time she met my father, she was in her early 30s and most of the village had decided she was an old maid that she would not amount to much.”

Lee’s father is a former intelligence officer under the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee. While she sees his abusive behavior as a factor in her mother’s depression, she does not see him as a villain.

“I think that our relationships, particularly intimate, familial relationships, are so complex,” said Lee. “Parental relationships are ones that we do not choose, we’re born into, and they’re very much inflected with cultural weight, but also almost existential personal weight. So it’s very hard for me to say my father’s a villain, although he was very abusive and he’s an incredibly difficult personality. We have a challenging relationship. I am aware that conversations can be very fraught. So oftentimes my exchanges have been contained. “

Her role as a director provided some emotional armor, a chance to approach sensitive conversations with some objectivity.

“Making the film allowed me the opportunity to conduct conversations I could never have had in person without a project like this.”

Making a film also provides witnesses, she said. The crew of her film witnessed their conversations and when the film is shown at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival the audience will also bear witness. So much of what happens in a family happens in private. So often there are no witnesses to violence or disrespect. It’s in those spaces, where so much can be taken from you.

“This must be why I’m interested in and have loved documentaries for so long, because I recognize it’s an opportunity to say, this happened,” said Lee. “Here’s some proof, here’s evidence, here’s some documentary proof, here’s some witnesses. I’m able to witness something that I know has happened. There’s a comfort in knowing that can be established. Collectively, we can say, do we recognize that this happened? And how do we move on from here?”

So many of Lee’s memories of her mother are tinged with sadness and grief. While making the film she realized that despite the dire circumstances of her mother’s life, she was a survivor.

“She made choices that reflected an incredible passion, a fierce determination to live,” said Lee. “In the end, I had to understand as I was making this film that the choices she made were to live really, not for her, but for myself and my sisters.”

Women’s stories are often forgotten, so Lee was happy to honor her mother with a cinematic portrait.

“Women like her are not assigned any merit by social standards,”said Lee. “She was an immigrant, uneducated, working class, a colonial subject, devalued, deemed worthless. There are countless women like my mother around the world, whose lives, whose stories are deemed completely of no use. I feel satisfied that at least I’ve made a film that recognizes her spirit, her determination to live her vitality against multiple odds, personal, political, social, cultural.”

Lee is a self-taught documentary maker, who now teaches film at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where her teaching and research focus on the relationship between art and social change.

“I didn’t know that I’d be making films until I was 30,” said Lee. “I had worked in radio for a while and I liked media. I had a real aptitude for storytelling that I found in radio, in print writing, and I got behind the camera because I wanted to tell the story of migrant farm workers in Canada. The first film I made, the way I taught myself was I watched a documentary, made copious notes about the content and the cutting style and storytelling devices. I thought, okay, those are the things I must do and just went that way. I made a lot of mistakes. Certainly, I understand now, because I teach filmmaking, that going to school to learn filmmaking is a privilege.”

Lee sees the arts as a powerful way to connect our mutual dreams and engage in important conversations. She hopes her film will help women of her mother’s generation, her own generation and also her children to recognize the extraordinary constraints women faced then in Korean society.

There Are No Words debuts at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 9.