Documentary • NR • 98 Minutes • 2025
Many documentaries focus on the subject of truth and the search to find the most objective version of it. There Are No Words instead begins with a simple question from filmmaker Min Sook Lee’s father when he asks if he can lie during their interviews. The film follows Lee’s deeply personal exploration into her family’s history, primarily her mother, who died by suicide when Lee was only a child and an added strain with her father, whose memory of his marriage and time in the KCIC (Korean Counterintelligence Corps) is fallible at best. Through these memories, Lee attempts to understand more about her mother and what may have driven her to her suicide in the early eighties. What starts as a straightforward documentary about memory and rebuilding an image of her mother through her father, friends, and extended family in Korea splinters into different narratives about culture, family and a revealing story about Lee’s father and his time in Korea before immigrating to Canada.
There Are No Words isn’t shiny. It’s a little rough around the edges and doesn’t reinvent the form. But jagged corners aren’t what makes a great documentary anyway. Sometimes letting the subject speak and the filmmaker simply point a camera at the people around them is what a documentary needs to be. It’s stripped back nearly to its rawest form of mainly interviews, narration, and sprinkled with some archival footage of Korea and Canada during the 1960s- 1980s. The footage of Korea and Canada post-Korean War is an incredible contrast where Korea’s more conservative gender roles and small village life are played against Toronto’s busy western metropolis. It shows just how big and jarring a move from Korea to Canada must have been for Lee’s family during that time.
Unlike the archival footage, which offers a glimpse of a time in Canada and Korea that no longer exists, Lee’s father presents an outdated outlook on relationships, and more specifically, his wife, that feels like a confessional insight reserved for priests behind a latticed partition. The bluntness with which he offers his interview makes it easy to place a big villain sticker on his forehead. Yet, at the same time he is such an interesting character that you can’t help but want to know everything about him and his time in intelligence. You’ll want to pick away at his truths and lies like you are a detective sitting across from him.
When a major piece of the puzzle comes into frame where we learn that Lee’s father had another family, there is either an intentional lack of information around the family or perhaps limited access, but what felt like a bombshell was never followed up on, and not much information was given. It almost shifts the narrative into another gear but ultimately left an interesting aspect of the family’s life in neutral. There is also a tonal whiplash between Lee’s narration and the rest of the filmmaking. The overly monotone and formal speaking tone of Lee’s voice as she provides voice-over and additional information clashes with the bluntness and unvarnished filmmaking and halts the momentum of the storytelling brought by the subjects.
The film deals a lot with the theme of the fallibility of memory, very reminiscent of another film from 2025, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, which also interrogates the ability of family members’ memories and a search to fit all the pieces of their lives together. Both films accept the fact that people are multifaceted and different people will have different interpretations of the same event, but watching There Are No Words is a different experience when you see the stories and memories being constructed in real time and documented right in front of you. We get to see the location where Lee’s mother and father were married. Lee’s father recounts an apparent joyous and memorable time surrounded by friends and family at a beautiful cliffside ceremony. To others, it was a marriage that was forced, in front of only family members who felt obligated to show up. Whose memory is correct? This is what Lee grapples with and asks the audience to ask as well. Can we put together the pieces of someone’s life and emotions through memory alone?
Min Sook Lee’s There Are No Words shifts between a spy-like thriller and an investigative biography, but ultimately settles on an introspective look into her own trauma surrounding her mother’s suicide and the life she had. By turning back the clock and investigating her history between two countries, Lee highlights a life never meant to be forgotten and a family legacy unknown to her and eye-opening to the audience.
Where to Watch
There Are No Words was viewed on NFB.
Also worth checking: CBC Gem (often carries Canadian titles not listed elsewhere).
about the author
Merrick Gajdics is founder, publisher and editor of The Canadian Film Reviewer.