Award-winning filmmaker Min Sook Lee turns the camera on herself in this documentary, tracing the afterlives of Cold War militarism through the memory of her mother, Song Ji Lee, who died when Lee was twelve.

Confrontational and speculative, There Are No Words revisits the people and places of Lee’s childhood in Toronto and Hwasun, South Korea. Rather than reconstructing a coherent past, the film stays with fragments, where memory is unstable and shaped by histories that exceed it.

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 Park Chung Hee in 1960s South Korea. He is her last direct connection to her mother, though an unreliable one, marked by silence, power, and a past that cannot be fully spoken.

Through a fabric of lived and imagined histories, Lee resists resolution. The film considers how histories of violence persist within intimate life, shaping what can be said, what remains withheld, and how the past continues to organize the present.

This film contains discussions of suicide, and the effects on survivors of suicide loss. If you need support services, please call your local Crisis Hotline.

Filmmaker expected to attend.