Covid was the ‘kick,’ Canadian filmmaker Min Sook Lee explains to BDE what finally determined her to make the NFB feature documentary There Are No Words, selected for TIFF Docs 2025. The film tells the story of her mother, Song Ji, who threw herself off the high-rise block where she lived with her husband and family, when Min Sook was just twelve.
Min Sook Lee may be a widely celebrated docmaker but it is only now, in her 50s, that she is able to come to grips with her mother’s story. “This is my ninth film. It’s taken me a long time to come close to it. Of course, it’s something that I wanted to so, but I didn’t know how,” she tells Business Doc Europe. “So many strong emotions and fears, but also a fear that I might not do it right. not do it justice. I didn’t know if I had the capacity, the creative… [she trails off]…So it took a long time.”
But then there was the pandemic, and it struck Min Sook that the folk who could fill the spaces and help tell the story of her mother’s life, may not be alive for so long. “COVID revealed to many of us that the clock is ticking and you make these choices now or never.”
One of these folks was her father, the 90-year old Chung Beum Lee, a man with whom Min Sook still maintains “a very strained relationship, but it’s pragmatic.” He was always a complicated character, a former member of South Korea’s national intelligence agency under dictator Park Chung Hee, and charged with rooting out North Korean spies in the 1950s. He was also a polygamist womaniser, violent towards his wife Song Ji and their children, and prone to flights of fantasy in his testimony. “Can I lie a little?” is the first question he asks his daughter when asked to contribute to the film.
But one thing that Min Sook wanted to make clear from the outset, was this was not a film about him, but about her mother. The fact that Song Ji’s life story could go untold or unrecorded was anathema to the filmmaker.
“There’s something much more violent than just death. It’s erasure, a social death, complete erasure from the social memory,” she tells BDE. “And I think many cultures understand that, which is just to vanquish you, never say your name, that’s a way in which someone’s entire spirit and life will then be extinguished,” she explains the potential wrong she wanted to right.
“There are so many women like [my mother] who have lived lives that have been considered disposable, who are considered just not even worth mentioning. If you look at many of the Korean history, where are the women?” she asks.
In her investigations into her mother’s life, Min Sook discovers that when she was a girl during WWII, Song Ji lived in Nagasaki, leaving just before the second atom bomb was dropped. Later, she settled in the Korean city of Hwasun where she got a job as a bus ticket inspector, a job she undertook with iron efficiency.
She had no experience with men, even if she had a strong tendency towards self-sufficiency, and when she met the younger Chung Beum Lee, she didn’t know he was already married. She was pregnant on their wedding day.
When they moved to Canada, together with their young family, Chung Beum erased all details of his old life, including his former wife and their children, as recorded in the hojeok (official family register). The new couple and their daughters thus started life in Canada with a blank slate.
Song Ji suffered horrendous racial discrimination in Toronto and worked all hours in a plastics factory, but she was receiving a monthly pay-check which delivered a sense of agency.
But her status as a second wife became public knowledge among Toronto’s Korean diaspora. What’s more her husband had what he calls “morbid suspicions of his wife’s chastity,” and banned her from dancing. An even more critical moment came after she discovered that much of the money she was earning was being sent back to Chung Beum’s first wife in Korea. Song Ji was hospitalised, suffering from weakness and depression, but discharged herself. Soon afterwards, she took her own life.
While Min Sook underlines her determination that her mother would be its focus – “I needed to make sure that I had space for her,” she tells BDE – was she ultimately successful in this endeavour, especially given the strength of her father’s personality and tendency to dominate the narrative?
“Originally, I thought I would be making a much more speculative, experimental film…I thought I would really like to find some joy in my mother’s story,” she answers. “I had been reading a lot of Saidiya Hartman, who is a writer and a theorist who talks about speculative fiction, and how women are disappeared from the archives, [how] they’re in the margins, considered unimportant.” Hartman writes primarily of black women in America, and asks how we can start seeing them “in a full way, a deeply humanised way,” Min Sook explains.
“I thought that that would be more my approach. But I didn’t contend with, I guess, the intensity of the conversations with my father, and the information that came forth,” she continues.
“Increasingly, with the initial conversations I’m having with people like yourself, I’ve become much more aware that this is a triangulated film. It’s about my mother and me and my father. And that’s something I didn’t set out to make.”
Equally, did Min Sook have misgivings about committing such a personal story to film? The director mulls over the question.
“I had a lot of self-doubt. I often had many questions about why I am doing this. This feels very painful. It’s not enjoyable. And to what end? Also questions about, can I do this? Is this permitted? It feels like you’re exposing your family in ways that are quite unsavoury. Or it feels like these are family stories that maybe you’re embarrassed to share – the shame and the stigma, all of those things. So, trusting is a very interesting question, especially when you’ve been raised in a family like I have, where I have a father whose relationship with the truth is unstable.”
But the story of her mother and the inequities she suffered had to be told, Min Sook maintains. “I’m very ensconced in documentary for lots of reasons, but one of them is this determination to say, ‘this did happen. It was there. Here’s some evidence of it.’”
“I’m very interested in truth and lies, silence and omission and the erasure from the archives in the public score,” she adds. “And I recognise that in family and personal narratives, these occur as well. And what’s the function of a lie or an omission? It’s to essentially ensure that the dominant narrative takes hold, that those who are oppressed are silenced, and truth is distorted.”
