Documentary is happy to debut the trailer from Min Sook Lee’s There Are No Words, which received an Honorable Mention for Best Canadian Feature at TIFF on Sunday. In her latest feature, the veteran documentarian (Hogtown, 2005; Migrant Dreams, 2016) searches for traces of her mother, who died by suicide when Lee was 12, across Toronto and Hwasun, South Korea. Through conversations with people who knew her parents, Lee circles through the Korean past under the Park Chung Hee dictatorship and her father’s former job at the national intelligence agency. The film culminates with Lee’s emotional conversations, including with her father, in a powerful reckoning with personal and political betrayal.

Lensed by Canada’s premier documentary cinematographer Iris Ng, and produced by Sherien Barsoum and Chanda Chevannes, There Are No Words is a National Film Board production with Chevannes and Anita Lee, TIFF’s current head of programming and previously the head of the NFB’s Ontario Studio, EPing for the public governmental agency.

Lee describes her motivations for making the film as follows:

My film, There Are No Words, addresses personal and collective trauma, imperfect memory, deception, and the political and social utility of silence to perpetuate dominance.

Over 40 years ago, my mother died by suicide. I was 12 years old at the time. The family I grew up in was an abusive one. My father, an agent with the Korean Central Intelligence Corps (KCIC), was trained to hurt people to protect dictatorial state power. With this film, I explore unstable memories, transgenerational trauma, and the ways in which social and political conditions frame our most intimate relationships.

Silence and shame followed my mother’s suicide. I realized that if I didn’t make this film, a default narrative would take over that amounted to a permanent death of who she was and could have been. I used this documentary to give life back to both of us.