Ticketing is required for the in-cinema presentation of this title, but tickets are free. Limit 2 tickets. This event will have open seating – sit anywhere in the venue that isn’t specifically reserved.
Canada202599 minEnglish, KoreanDirected By Women, Documentary
In There Are No Words, award-winning filmmaker Min Sook Lee searches for stories of her mother, Song Ji Lee, who died by suicide when Lee was just 12 years old. Through an intimate archive, Lee confronts public, private, and imagined histories in the wake of trauma while negotiating her relationship with her aging father, who met her mother while serving in the Korean Counterintelligence Corps under dictator Park Chung Hee in 1960s Korea. Despite being an unreliable narrator, Lee’s father is her last direct tie to her mother.
Lee turns the camera on herself to trace her experiences from Toronto to her birthplace in South Korea's Hwasun County and back, documenting tender efforts to speak her mother into collective memory. There Are No Words is a brave meditation on grief, loss, memory, and longing, reminding us that even when language fails us, there is still so much to say.
– Jasmine Gui
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Toronto International Film Festival, 2025
Min Sook Lee
Min Sook Lee is an award-winning director with acclaimed documentaries including Migrant Dreams (2016) and The Real Inglorious Bastards (2012). As an associate professor at OCAD University, Lee’s area of research and practice focuses on the intersections of art and social change in labour, border politics, migration, and social justice movements.
13 Nov, 2025 7:30 pm
Innis Town HallAA
Ticketing is required for the in-cinema presentation of this title, but tickets are free. Limit 2 tickets. This event will have open seating – sit anywhere in the venue that isn’t specifically reserved.
CONTENT ADVISORY
suicide, depictions of mental illness, self-harm, trauma, death/dying, discussions of sexual and gendered violence
IN PERSON ACCESSIBILITY
This film is scheduled to be presented fully captioned (all dialogue subtitled + sound cues indicated). This screening will have a Held Space on-site on the third floor. A Held Space is a calm setting hosted by HELD Agency where you can decompress. This space has a designated Active Listener present, who uses a Peer-Based approach to support you through discussing, distracting, and/or de-escalating – whatever you choose and need in the moment. The Active Listener will be available for attendees throughout this event until 10:30pm.
Wheelchair spaces and step-free seating is available for this screening – click below to book accessible seats.
York University’s Korean Office for Research and Education with funds from the Academy of Korean Studies, and the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Study of Korea
Join us for a Q&A immediately after the screening with director Min Sook Lee moderated by Hoa Nguyen.
Hoa Nguyen
Moderator
Hoa Nguyen is a poet and educator teaching writing and poetics at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her books include Red Juice, the Griffin Prize-nominated Violet Energy Ingots, and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, a finalist for the National Book Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award.
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In collaboration with the Independent Media Arts Alliance, Reel Ideas will co-host a three-day mini-conference focused on artist advocacy, fair pay, and building an equitable arts ecosystem.
Ever since astronaut-in-training Celeste was a child, Robot has served as a surrogate parent while her mother explored the galaxy. When Celeste starts a months-long mission after graduation, the pair must explore the unknowns of life without each other.
Founded in Toronto in 1997, Reel Asian is Canada’s largest pan-Asian film festival and a year-round cultural organization dedicated to championing Asian and Asian diasporic artists and storytellers. What began as a grassroots film festival has grown into a national platform supporting filmmakers and audiences through screenings, education, industry initiatives, artist development, and community programming presented across Toronto, the GTA, and online across Canada.
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