Min Sook Lee
Arts Film Documentary Media Arts Visual Arts Person
Min Sook Lee is an award winning filmmaker. Her body of work includes HOGTOWN The Politics of Policing’ (Best Feature-length Canadian Documentary, Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival 2005), El Contrato (Gemini Award nomination for Best Social/ Political Documentary) and Tiger Spirit, a reunification road-trip through the two Koreas (Gemini Award Winner of Best Social/Political Documentary, finalist for the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival 2009). This clip from Lee's City Hall documentary Hogtown featuring Toronto Mayor Rob Ford who was then a City Councilor, behaving boorishly as he hectors a harried journalist has had a viral presence online, blogged about by Roger Ebert and cited in many media channels as evidence that Ford is unfit for office.
Her short docu-poems Borderless (about undocumented workers) and Sedition (featuring the spoken work political poetry of Boona Mohammed and Rafeef Ziadah) have played at international festivals. Min Sook was also presented with the Cesar E. Chavez Black Eagle Award for El Contrato’s impact on the rights of migrant workers. Min Sook premiered her documentary My Toxic Baby at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Badge of Pride, her documentary on gay cops was released in 2009 and broadcast on CBC's The Passionate Eye. Badge of Pride premiered on US television on PBS New York in 2012.
Min Sook is the co-creator of the hit comedy series ‘SHE’S THE MAYOR’ (http://www.earthbook.tv/shesthemayor/) which premiered on Vision TV in 2011 and ran for one season. The series starring Janet Laine Greene, Tonya Lee Williams and Coline Mochrie told the story of an elderly woman who runs for the mayoralty as a protest act and unexpectedly wins the vote. Once ensconced in power, the political neophyte has to figure out how to govern without turning into what she protested in the first place. In 2011 Lee also released : The Real MASH – the true story of the people that inspired the fiction TV series. (http://therealmash.com/) The doc garnered a Golden Sheaf nomination, a Gemini nomination for best editing and was presented with an Honourable Mention from the International Columbus Film & Video Awards.
Min Sook is in production on two projects: The Real Inglorious Bastards, a documentary about Jewish spies behind enemy lines during WWII; and SKETCH CITY, an interactive documentary developed with street youth about their lives.
Lee teaches documentary production in the Documentary Media (MFA) Program at Ryerson University.