Korea is always on one’s mind in Min Sook Lee’s new, personal documentary There Are No Words. Culture and politics meet as she assembles the pieces of the broken story of her neuro atypical mother. Her mother, who dies by suicide back in 1982, lives through her memory as well as her father’s, still alive. Her memory is obviously fractured but so is his for different reasons – his reliability is very questionable. And so she confronts her father, asking questions like “did [Mom] already know that you had a wife?”. Again, I’ve established that these are real people but I also reacted that this documentary is getting juicy. The documentary, then, mixes up these interviews with archive footage of Canada and Korea’s relationship during the 80s.
There Are No Words’ content makes up for how the aesthetics here don’t have to invent the wheel. Sometimes, pointing the camera at anyone or oneself can make anything interesting because people are interesting. Her father’s face, not the easiest to decipher, is baffling because of how he treats Lee’s mother. The documentary juxtaposes those images with Lee, and if one looks closely, she’s darting her eyes at her father. There’s archive footage here of Korea’s former dictator, Chun Doo-Hwan visiting Canada, ignoring protesters against him. The footage seems banal at first, but then her father calls Chun a good person which is mind blowing. Context is everything in this very personal work.
- Rated: Unrated
- Genre: Documentary
- Release Date: 9/9/2025
- Directed by: Min Sook Lee
- Produced by: Chanda Chevannes, Sherien Barsoum
- Studio: National Film Board of Canada (NFB)
