The filmmaker Min Sook Lee discusses her documentary There Are No Words (having its BC premiere at the DOXA Festival, Sunday, 03 May 2026 [1]), with Joseph Planta.
Text of the introduction by Joseph Planta:
I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.
When my guest now, Min Sook Lee was 12 years old, her mother Song Ji Lee died by suicide. This is some nearly forty-five years ago now, and there aren’t many people who knew her mother from the 1970s and 1980s when Min Sook was growing up in Toronto, let alone when her mother was younger in Hwasun, South Korea. The last direct connection to her mother is her father, now 90-years old, who admittedly, Min Sook hasn’t had a particularly close connection. In fact, it was the isolation of the pandemic that made all of this urgent for Min Sook, as I’ll ask her about. The result is the documentary There Are No Words, which is having its British Columbia premiere. Her father worked for the national intelligence agency under the dictator Park Chung Hee. So, perhaps because of that work her father isn’t necessarily reliable as a narrator. Add to that, years of abuse, that her mother and she and her siblings suffered at his hands. There’s distance between Min Sook and her father, and it’s also linguistic and generational. It’s regional too, considering where her parents were from in Korea and the dialect he spoke. There’s class involved too as a result, and the shadow of her father’s militarism as well as the Cold War intelligence culture in which he worked darkens a lot of their family’s history. I’ll ask Min Sook, who joined me from Toronto last week, about the portrait of her mother that she’s gained as a result of making this film, and the complications of her relationship with her father. It’s a gripping story. It screens this Sunday afternoon at 2.45pm at the SFU Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema, 149 West Hastings. It’s part of this year’s DOXA Festival. Visit www.doxfestival.ca [2] for tickets and information. There Are No Words is a National Film Board of Canada production. Please welcome to the Planta: On the Line program, Min Sook Lee; Min Sook, good morning.
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