Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: On the podcast today, Min Suk Lee talks about her new film about her search for memories of her mother, who died by suicide when Lee was 12.
Speaker: In her latest film, There Are No Words, award-winning documentary filmmaker Min Suk Lee turns the camera towards herself. The film documents Lee's search for memories of her mother, Song Ji Lee, who died by suicide when Lee was 12 years old There Are No Words was produced by the National Film Board. It has its Western Canada premiere at the Doxa Documentary Film Festival in May. And Minsuk Lee joins me today from Toronto. Hello, Minsuk.
Speaker: Hi. Now, you've been making documentaries for more than 20 years on a variety of social justice issues. What made you decide to make this deeply personal film?
Speaker: There's a lot of different reasons. Some of it is timing. i think COVID made a lot of us think about the reality. You know, time's going to run out and those things that you wanted to do are not going to be possible if...
Speaker: while I was looking at my father's mortality. So that's what was definitely a motivator for me. My father is well on in his years. He's now just over 90.
Speaker: And I was aware that if he wasn't around, then I wouldn't be able to speak to anyone who would share in a fulsome way, in a vivid way, any stories about my mother, because he would be the one person who could remember her when she was young, what she was like.
Speaker: and share stories with me about who she was. So I needed to talk to my father and we have always had a very challenging relationship. Not the closest, a very intense one and one that has been fraught with many tensions And often one in which communication has been really challenging because one, I don't speak Korean very well and he doesn't speak English very well. So we're often reduced to very basic survival language.
Speaker: So there's that reality that I contend with. And I think it's a very familiar one for many first generation immigrants in the diaspora. But also too, we're a family that doesn't talk, like many families, about the important things. So my mom died when I was 12, but we never really talked about her death, the circumstances of her death, what happened, even the day that she died, there was no processing any of that. so Realizing that my father is going to pass soon and all of the conversations I need to have with him would be impossible. I needed to talk to him.
Speaker: realized this is my one opportunity to sit down and have a focused thoughtful, comprehensive conversation with him about very difficult things.
Speaker: So that was one motivator. i think another more sort of lifelong piece of making this film is when my mother died, Her death framed my life. Subsequently, all of my life has been shaped and informed by my mother's life and her death. And I knew that I would want to make a film about her to talk about what happened to her, what her life was like, but I was also afraid, I think obviously afraid to go near that emotional subject matter, but also afraid that I wouldn't have the creative skill sets because it's such a precious story to me. So I didn't want to mess it up.
Speaker: It's certainly a story and a subject matter and an issue that I know I've always wanted to find a meaningful way to address.
Speaker: um I think those are the two primary pieces for me. Now, the first conversation we hear you have with your father in the film is about telling the truth, and you specifically ask him not to lie. And then later on, we realize that he is lying or misrepresenting or forgetting. How do you manage that tension in the movie with your main source being so unreliable?
Speaker: I think that my father's presence in my life has been difficult for lots of reasons but one of them is he was trained to be deceptive. He was an agent with the Korean Counterintelligence Corporation, the Korean CIC, when he was in the army and when he joined the army in 61, that same year the Korean CIA was formed by the dictator Park Chung-hee.
Speaker: So my father was disciplined and trained and valorized for his ability to tell stories in a deceptive way.
Speaker: And so I have always known him to be an untrustworthy narrator, but he also has a personality, ah disposition, a predisposition to exaggerate, to center himself, and to not be the most transparent or accountable truth teller.
Speaker: And so that's been something I've had to deal with for most of my life. And perhaps that's why we never really had any conversations about my mother, because I would have felt very suspect about the answers I got from him. And I don't know that I could have dealt with the emotional frustration or the kind of residual anger that comes out of knowing that you're not getting you know the real deal.
Speaker: And when I set out to make the film, i knew that there had to be some guardrails established for myself and for him. So I was clear with him that this was a film about my mother, not about him, because he welcomed a media project about his life and about his story.
Speaker: And I had to tell him that that's not what this film is about. and I think he agreed to cooperate with this film because he understood that it's a project that's important to me and he loves me, he's my father and he wants me, oddly, to succeed as professionally. And so to support a film that I'm making, I i believe, he never said this straight out, was for him a way to
Speaker: support my work. Although he has always commented that my documentaries are boring and he always thought that I should add some more guns or action or dramatic fist fights. So he's encouraged me when I think about it to embellish.
Speaker: But anyways, getting my father to be straightforward, to be accountable, To be able to know whether I'm getting a story that I can trust, that was something I knew would be a territory full of landmines for me. And so one of the guardrails I had from the outset was reminding my father, let's be truthful here.
Speaker: And he wanted to participate in the film for lots of reasons, as I said. And I think he said to me repeatedly, this is a story that needs to be told.
Speaker: and I wanna make sure that it's told. That was important for him. But the difficulty of knowing as you're walking into this room that you're not necessarily going to have a story that you can believe or trust came with the territory. And I moved forward with the film knowing that Anyone who watches the film is going to have to sort through the information that's shared from my father, but then also from other people I speak to.
Speaker: And in some ways decide what they believed or where they land. And for me, I think that's okay. It's not a film that seeks to make any tidy resolutions or to be directive. in sort of spoon feeding you the information and then the conclusion that you're supposed to walk away from.
Speaker: it is unresolved as life is unresolved. And it also reflects the nature and I think the honesty of what documentary filmmaking is anyways.
Speaker: We are never able to have a full truth with a capital T. We're always working with partial truths. and to pretend that you are the truth teller that everyone can then objectively count on for the record, for a journalistic record or for a legal record or archival purposes, all of those are very much manufactured by the agendas of those who decide what is important to legitimize as truth, what is important to remember as the record, and what is important to record as legitimate history. So
Speaker: I think questioning the very idea of truth is part of my nature as a documentary filmmaker. So that wasn't a surprise, but certainly having a primary participant in my film, who's my father, who I have a very intense relationship with, who all my life I've known is untrustworthy with the truth. Certainly that was just a reality.
Speaker: And so I think I moved forward in making this film with that as a known factor. When I spoke to my father with an interpreter, and those were most of my main interviews with my father were with an interpreter. So there was this triangulated exchange between myself, the interpreter and my father. And funnily enough, I realized that speaking with my father has often been quite difficult.
Speaker: Often I do what I need to do for elder care, medical visits or grocery drop-offs or just all of the perfunctory basic supports that you do to ensure that someone has their material needs met.
Speaker: But we never sat down and had long lengthy conversations about the world, what we felt or our experiences processing life. And in order to move into this the territory of this film, the stories that i wanted to talk about I needed to hire and an interpreter who then facilitated the conversation and then I had the camera and I thought what was interesting was certainly we would never have had these conversations without the film project
Speaker: And this is a kind of film that would never have been, you know, like some films are something happens and you want to film it as it's happening, as it's unfolding before you. Well, this is a film in which nothing that happened in the film would have been possible for the film. So the film catalyzed conversations and relationships and insights.
Speaker: No, he's not the only person who is sharing truths about your mother. You talk with friends and neighbors from her hometown, and they describe a very different person from the mother that you knew. What was she like before she married?
Speaker: That was one of the most amazing parts about making this film. It was a real privilege. Filmmaking is a privilege, I think. And I know that cameras wield a lot of power and to be able to put together a narrative into the world you know, it takes resources. So to be able to travel to Korea, to go to the village that I was born in and to speak to people who knew my mother as a young woman was a deep, deep privilege, and it was very precious to me. I know that my mom's own life, I kind of knew a few facts,
Speaker: But the opportunity I had to go to Korea gave me access to a much deeper, richer understanding of who my mother was. And again, I had another person who worked with me as an interpreter and who was also you know a fellow documentary filmmaker, so very thoughtful and nuanced and in how they understood the conversations needed to take place with a camera and with other people. So I had always grown up with a mother who was frankly just very depressed, who was shut down, who worked a lot.
Speaker: We had a little variety store in Toronto and in the 1970s, were part of a working class ah wave of new immigrants who changed the culture of Toronto, which from the 1950s, Toronto was very waspy.
Speaker: Italians were considered ethnic. So when racialized people entered Toronto, largely in the 1970s is when we started to come, people from Vietnam, people from Korea, in other regions of the world that were impacted by Western imperialism, impacted by global wars and conflicts driven by Cold War power struggles.
Speaker: When people started to arrive in Toronto, it really did change the cultural makeup. Growing up in Toronto, what i recall of my mother was her working all the time in our little variety store. She didn't speak English very well, so she didn't really have a wide social network. We were one of the first waves of Korean immigrants in Toronto at the time, so our community was small.
Speaker: So she was an isolated person. who, if she wasn't working behind the counter of our variety store, then she was upstairs cooking and cleaning and taking care of the house and myself and my siblings.
Speaker: And she was quiet. was... she was Someone who basically whose life and mobility was compromised by her social isolation, her lack of English, and the fact that my father was a very dominant patriarch. And he was also very violent. So I grew up seeing a mother who was very flat, who was silent, who seemed unable to engage with the world in a, from a place of power who seemed powerless.
Speaker: And she was, she was structurally made powerless. That's the difference. When I went to Korea and I spoke to people who knew my mother as a young woman, i learned that she was an incredibly vivacious, powerful young woman.
Speaker: And she was born in Japan. part of a migrant Korean community living in Japan when Korea was colonized and under the power of Japan.
Speaker: And she was border in Japan, moved back to Korea with her family when she was, from what I understand, about 10 years old. And then she grew up in this tiny village, Hwasun, and she was a determined, resourceful, energetic person who had a very fierce will to live.
Speaker: and also a strong sense of justice. Her job, she had many jobs, many of them in the gray economy, so to speak. She would raise pigs and in order to raise them, she was collecting the dirty water, the gray water from different rooming houses or restaurants and such.
Speaker: She did that. Sometimes she helped her friend who ran a cafe She would help her friends sometimes in the coffee shop. Her family had a tiny little, I would don't even want to call it a variety store, but they they had a little counter where they sold little sundries and cigarettes, let's say.
Speaker: Her primary cash earning job, she worked for the buses, selling bus tickets. And doing that job required someone who could engage with a lot of people. Lots of people coming in, buying bus tickets to go to Seoul, go to Gwangju, the neighboring bigger city. And so she was really active. And part of her job, once she sold the bus tickets and people got the ticket, like it was when the bus is departing, she'd get on the bus and make sure everyone who was on the bus had a ticket and that they had paid.
Speaker: And i heard stories about her confronting young men who refused to give seats to older grandmothers. One story that people, and this is quite amazing to me, 50 years later, I returned to this village, nobody recognizes me.
Speaker: But when I say whose daughter I am, there are some grandmothers who remember my mother, and they have these really sharp memories of her activities.
Speaker: And I spoke to four grandmothers, and all of them had a similar account of her personality. They said she was not...
Speaker: like a woman, that she was very man-like because she wouldn't let anyone put her down, tell her what to do, and she would confront men if she felt that an injustice had been carried out.
Speaker: And there was one story that was notorious. ah She slapped a man on the bus because, i guess, of his rude behavior. So the stories I collected were of this really vivacious, energetic, resourceful young woman who did work outside of the house. Not all young women at the time in the 1960s did cast jobs working. It was a new generation for Korea at that time for women to work outside of the house.
Speaker: And I also learned that she was a voracious reader. And she read many, many books in Japanese because that was her first language.
Speaker: And she could quote some of the passages from the Japanese writer that she loved. And I was really stunned by that because I never saw her read a book.
Speaker: And I love reading myself and that she loved music. Certain musicians she adored and she would go to concerts.
Speaker: Like one musician who came into town, the nearby big town, Gwangju, he had concerts, a series of a few nights and she went every night to hear him perform.
Speaker: So this person that was described to me was completely foreign to me, was not the mother I grew up with. And I loved meeting her through these stories.
Speaker: and i was enthralled. And I also was kind of, you know, i I had to keep reminding myself, they're not making this up for you, Min Sook. This is what they remember. They have no idea how this story will land for you. Because I'm a feminist, I'm very political, I have a keen social justice commitment to fighting for equity, all of the fronts that matter in our in our life around class, gender, race, sexual orientation.
Speaker: And so the person that was described to me was like this organic intellectual who was going to be fighting for justice and determined to live on her terms. And I was very, you know, I was amazed to meet this person. Oh, it must just have been wonderful for you.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not as though I was walking around with like flowers in my eyes, but I i was it was really... You know what it was like? It's like when you grow up with no stories, knowing nothing,
Speaker: And now you have an opportunity to talk to people in and it's not like this luxurious opulent opportunity. You have a few days, you know, and you're thinking about the production and you're there in a certain amount of time. And, you know, i mean, I wish I had a different process to spend that whole summer seasons hanging out with grandmothers talking about my mother, but it was certain constraints.
Speaker: So I think the way in which I responded to these stories at the time was to like, imagine you're this rodent living in a cave underground. and you run up and you grab a nut and then you run back down and you store it. I felt like that, like I was getting these amazing nuts that I'm gonna kind of hurriedly pick up, look around me, make sure I can take it and then store it away. and And only now in reflection with someone like yourself, let's say, where I can have a focused conversation about the feeling,
Speaker: of learning this, can I actually feel some of that in the way that, you know, you're suggesting the sense of like wonder and marvel or also when I'm editing. But then when you're editing, there's ah another disciplinary sort of thought process that kicks in. So, yeah, it was amazing. It was wonderful. But that wonder has a sort of a long term sort of fuse. And, you know, it comes in smaller, bright moments. And this is one of them just talking to you.
Speaker: I wanted to ask you about that process between being in the situation and then editing a situation because the film opens and closes with very striking images and sounds from a Korean ceremony of remembrance involving a mudang, a shaman.
Speaker: And you've written that your experience of that ceremony while it was happening, and it was six hours, was quite different from how you felt about it when you were editing.
Speaker: How so? So that was a kut. And it's a very specific kind of kut that families can ask a mudang to carry out for their deceased ancestors because their ancestors passed away from this earth in a state of some kind of unresolved condition.
Speaker: And mudang who I reached out to, had i had read about her carrying out a kut for someone who had been tortured and imprisoned and then disappeared by the military dictatorship, Chun Doo Hwan's military dictatorship. and when I read about her doing a kut for that person, I thought, oh, she would understand how to do a kut for my mother.
Speaker: And so it was a long ceremony, started very early in the morning, went on into the late of the day. it was cold and it was rainy. And there were many sort of hiccups to setting up the kuhut. And then, of course, there I am filming it. So I'm aware of the camera. And so when you're shooting something, it's difficult to be lost in the moment of the thing that you're shooting. You're hyper aware of ensuring that you can use the tools that you've brought with the creative collaborators that you're working with to adequately get the coverage you need to ensure you have the material to edit with. And that's
Speaker: one way in which you are experiencing something that can be really quite profound. It's through this bubble of a sort, production bubble.
Speaker: And i think that many filmmakers, documentary filmmakers in particular, understand that when we are experiencing or in the moment of something happening and we're filming it,
Speaker: There's a way in which you are present on multiple levels. So you're there, but you're also there like filming and it becomes a way of living two lives.
Speaker: And you're gathering material so that you can relive that experience in the edit suite. And then you can recreate it in all its dimensions and its power and beauty as you remember it.
Speaker: And so when you are experiencing something, you are observant and you are there. You're very present to notice everything, but simultaneously you're you're making sure that you have the wherewithal to film the way you're noticing everything.
Speaker: So filming in the kut is a very specific experience of the kut and It's a ceremony that is very spiritual.
Speaker: The mudang is a shaman and mudangs in Korea are understood to be able to speak with spirits, but also speak with powers that are not mortal, not human powers.
Speaker: The power of the mountains, of animals, of the wind, of water, of energy, Mudangs are deeply able to intuit natural forces of power.
Speaker: And I had this mudang speak to my mother's spirit to call her into our space and to reassure her that she could go with more peace and that things were okay to console her in a way. And the kud itself The details of the ritual are much deeper than what I can even share with you because I don't fully understand, but there's different stages and steps to the ritual, which the mudang carries out about inviting the spirit, honoring the spirit, and then hosting the spirit and finally saying goodbye to the spirit. And there's different actions and there's um live music accompaniment to this ceremony and
Speaker: everyone is working in tandem with the different stages of the the ceremony. it's ah I think that if you were to completely give yourself up to the music, to the mundong's ceremonial actions, there's bowing and there's there's ah a kind of a singing and a calling out, you could possibly lose yourself in that ceremony in the sense that maybe relax your rational self and be more open to the emotional, spiritual self in which you've
Speaker: feel open to speaking to or being aware of or in connection to you know spirits outside of your own you know mortal coil but I I don't know that I was able to do that when we were in the ceremony itself because of all my production thoughts my hyper awareness of making sure that I had footage and then being aware of the cold and the rain and the time and and all of the other concerns you have when you're shooting. But it was after when I was in the edit suite, I had the material with which I could look at the ceremony. And of course, I had beautiful material to work with because Irysingh is a phenomenal cinematographer.
Speaker: and I could see the way in which the ceremony was the way it was filmed from different angles and the duration of it. And I worked with a very talented editor, Young Zong, who cut the mudang ceremony into something that was very powerful.
Speaker: And then it was in the edit suite, working with Yang, looking at the material, listening to it, that I could feel the spiritual power of that ceremony.
Speaker: Well, it's an ah an incredibly powerful film. And I really thank you for speaking with me today, Minsuk. It's been a delight to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker: I've been speaking with the award-winning documentary filmmaker Min Suk Lee. Her most recent film is There Are No Words, produced by the National Film Board. It has its Western Canadian premiere as part of the Doxa Documentary Film Festival, and you can see it on Sunday, May 3rd in the afternoon at the Javed Moafagian Cinema at SFU.
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Speaker: Thanks for listening.
