Min Sook Lee’s mother died by suicide. Using her camera, Lee explores long-held silences, unstable memories and unforgettable truths, attempting to understand what happened.
Award-winning filmmaker Min Sook Lee searches for memories of her mother, Song Ji Lee, who died by suicide when Lee was 12 years old. 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. Through a fabric of real and imagined histories, Lee reveals that some stories must still be told, even when the words are forgotten.
There Are No Words, Min Sook Lee, provided by the National Film Board of Canada