Min Sook Lee’s documentary There Are No Words topped the winners at this year’s Reel Asian International Film Festival. There Are No Words scored the Reel Asian-DOC Institute Best Documentary Award among the prizes handed out today. The NFB doc tells Lee’s personal story and that of her parents as she gets her guarded father to open up about the harmful consequences of his behaviour and his impact on Lee’s mother, who died by suicide after the family moved to Canada from Korea. The film previously earned a special mention at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“At once brave, beautiful, and heartbreaking, there are no answers in this investigation of transgenerational silences intertwined with personal and political histories of migration, violence, and family secrets,” remarked the jury in a statement. “This haunting film is a moving ode to living on in the face of grief and difficult inheritances.” There Are No Words screens at Reel Asian on Nov. 13.
Other winners on the documentary side included Calvin Liu, who won the cinematography prize for his work on Motel Grand-Pré, while Ali Kazimi received the Fire Horse Award, announced earlier this year, in recognition of his career as a filmmaker and activist. Reel Asian hosts a retrospective screening of Kazimi’s 1994 award winner Narmada: A Valley Rises on Nov. 8 to celebrate his career.
Montreal, My Beautiful, meanwhile, scored the RBC Best Canadian Film Award shortly after winning the same honours at the Windsor International Film Festival. The drama by Xiaodan He tells the story of a Chinese-Canadian woman (Joan Chen) who finds love with a much younger Quebecois woman (Charlotte Aubin) in Montreal.
Other documentaries at the festival include Third Act (Nov. 8) and Year of the Cat (Nov. 11).
