“I feel deeply exposed, and in some ways, I feel a little bit ashamed,” filmmaker Min Sook Lee tells POV. “I wish I had a happy family story to tell.”
The family story at the heart of Lee’s documentary There Are No Words may not be easy or happy, but it’s absolutely necessary. The film, now streaming for free from the National Film Board of Canada, sees Lee confront the unspoken histories of her family as her parents migrated from South Korea to Canada and established a family anew with a little shop in Toronto’s east end that symbolized new beginnings.
However, as Lee spends time with her aging and ailing father, she learns the untold stories about her mother, who died by suicide years before. Frank and revealing conversations expose the family’s story with powerful nakedness as Lee’s father opens up with rare candour. His stories offer unexpected revelations, but also ones that likely evoke difficult if familiar narratives for Canadians whose families form part of the global diaspora.
“I’ve constantly asked myself, ‘Why did I make this film?’” Lee told POV in an interview for issue #124. “I wanted to make sure that my mother’s story was told; that she wasn’t erased from history. I wanted other people who had experienced similar things to feel seen. This is a familiar story not only for many diasporic Koreans, but also for many intergenerational traumatized people whose parents were in militarist societies.”
There Are No Words premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival and won Best Documentary at Reel Asian, among other honours, for Lee’s intimate and powerful exploration of her family’s pain.
Watch There Are No Words below from the NFB:
There Are No Words, Min Sook Lee, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
