Synopsis | There Are No Words follows award-winning filmmaker LEE Min Sook as she searches for the truth of her mother who died by suicide when she was twelve years old. Beginning with the silence left by this loss, she turns the camera on herself and retraces the fragments of her childhood across Toronto, Canada, and the place of her birth: Hwasun, South Korea. As she confronts the people, places, and histories that shaped her family, the film moves between testimony, memory, and speculation. There Are No Words traces a daughter’s attempt to give form to an absence, revealing how grief, trauma, and inherited history continue to live in the body even after words fail.

Programmer's note | One’s personal history is never solely personal. It is shaped by the larger histories that surround it. In turning toward what has been lost, There Are No Words moves not toward absence, but toward presence: toward remaining traces, surfacing truths, and the connections made possible through speculation. This movement gives absence a tangible weight. It is not a void to be filled by explanation, but a space where memory, family, grief, and history press against one’s body. And what has been withheld cannot always be restored through language. Sometimes, it must be approached through fragments, return, listening, and the vulnerable work of following what still calls from the past. Through this act of tracing, the self does not disappear into loss, It becomes more awake to the life that has endured around the wound. There Are No Words reminds us that some silences are not broken by speech, but by the deeper forces that outlast it.