Min Sook Lee's deeply personal National Film Board of Canada (NFB) feature documentary There Are No Words will have its world premiere at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which takes place September 4-14, 2025.
Over 40 years ago, Lee's mother died by suicide. In There Are No Words, the award-winning Toronto filmmaker explores long-held silences, unstable memories and unforgettable truths, attempting to understand what happened.
There Are No Words will screen in the TIFF Docs program, showcasing the best in non-fiction cinema from around the world.
More about There Are No Words (98 min)
Produced for the NFB by Sherien Barsoum and Chanda Chevannes
Min Sook Lee turns the camera on herself in this urgent documentary, searching for memories of her mother, Song Ji Lee, who died by suicide when Lee was just 12 years old.
Confrontational and speculative, There Are No Words reckons with how trauma fractures memory as Lee revisits the people and places of her childhood in Toronto, Canada, and Hwasun, South Korea, her place of birth.
A looming figure in this search is Lee's now 90-year-old father, who met her mother while serving in a national intelligence agency under dictator Park Chung Hee in 1960s South Korea. He is her last direct connection to her mother, although he's an unreliable narrator with a history of abuse who speaks in a mother tongue she cannot fully understand.
Through a fabric of real and imagined histories, Lee reveals that some stories must still be told, even when there are no words for grief.
"Silence and shame followed my mother's suicide. I realized that if I didn't make this film, a default narrative would take over that amounted to a permanent death of who she was and could have been. I used this documentary to give life back to both of us."
-Min Sook Lee
About the filmmaker
Min Sook Lee is an award-winning director whose work explores themes of labour, migration and social justice. Her acclaimed documentaries include Migrant Dreams (2016), named Best Labour Documentary by the Canadian Association of Journalists and recipient of the Canadian Hillman Prize; The Real Inglorious Bastards (2012), winner of a Canadian Screen Award; Tiger Spirit (2008), which won the Donald Brittain Gemini Award; Hogtown (2005), named Best Canadian Feature at Hot Docs; and the Gemini-nominated El Contrato (2003).
She is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Cesar E. Chavez Black Eagle Award and the Alanis Obomsawin Award for Commitment to Community and Resistance. Canada's oldest labour arts festival, Mayworks, has named the Min Sook Lee Labour Arts Award in her honour.
Lee is an Associate Professor at OCAD University, where her area of research and practice focuses on the critical intersections of art and social change in labour, border politics, migration and social justice movements.
