Content warning: suicide.
When documentary filmmaker Min Sook Lee was 12 years old, her mother died by suicide. It’s a loss that echoed through Lee’s whole life, but it wasn’t until recently that the Korean Canadian documentarian decided to turn the camera to her own life and her mother’s death 40 years ago.
“How do you make this film that I have wanted to make probably my whole life?” Lee asks, reflecting on her journey to making her new documentary There Are No Words. Her mother’s death and the fall-out from that event was still something that Lee and her father never talked about, even as the grief haunted her. For Lee, she couldn’t “go near telling this story, ever.”
But after becoming the primary caregiver to her father for the past decade, and the COVID-19 pandemic putting her 89-year-old father’s mortality front of mind for the filmmaker, Lee knew she needed to talk to father about her mother before it was too late. “I realized that if he dies, then she’ll also die in a specific way,” Lee says. “If he dies, he’ll take all the stories of her with him and then she’ll die this permanent death.”
Lee was also inspired by the work of other Korean women, which helped her see how she could tell her story without it becoming “flattened and downsized into something that’s digestible, consumable and formulaic.” She was inspired by books like Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, which reminded her of the power of storytelling, and Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like War which also explores war in the Korean peninsula and how Korean culture and families were shaped by conflict. Both sparked a recognition of her own experiences and a reminder that there’s “such validation and power in reading and seeing our stories on screen or on paper or on stage,” she says.
Over the course of about two years, Lee and her father talked in front of the camera. They talked about his life as an intelligence agent under dictator Park Chung Hee in the ‘60s, about his life in Korea and the decision to move to Canada and of course, about her mother and her death. The resulting film is screening at this year’s Reel Asian Film Festival. It’s a tight documentary that expands Lee’s search for truth about her mother’s life and death into a meditation on how silence functions in a society and in a family.
“The title, There Are No Words, speaks to multiple losses of language,” Lee says, pointing to her experience of anti-Asian racism in her youth which caused her to reject the Korean language. That first silence—the loss of her language—meant that Lee felt like she was “in this liminal space” without her language as an access point to her Korean heritage for much of her life. Coupled with the stigma surrounding her mother’s mental health and death, which meant that no one would say her name for years, Lee felt a suffocating silence that made her grief feel even bigger.
“I believe very strongly that when someone dies, if people speak their name, it’s a way of bringing their spirit back to life,” Lee says. “You can die a flesh death, but your presence and spirit can be remembered and celebrated. This is how people are kept alive forever.”
In fact, during the making of the documentary, Lee finds out that her mother was a “really butch feminist tough no-nonsense woman with a strong sense of justice,” she says with a small laugh. “I was amazed. I knew the ways in which my mother’s life was diminished because of the social forces of her time.” Lee points to her mother’s birth in imperial Japan, where Koreans were persecuted as colonial subjects, her mother’s working class background and the ways that her father abused her.
“Making this film, I wanted to ensure that it wasn’t a purely personal story, that it was a personal story informed by political and social conditions and systems and structures,” Lee says. “I knew that she wasn’t alone and that I’m not alone and if I can speak honestly to what we went through, other people can recognize that they are not alone.”
There Are No Words will screen on November 13 at 7:30PM at Innis Town Hall as a part of the Reel Asian Film Festival. Get tickets here. RepresentASIAN Project is a proud media sponsor of the festival.
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