Min Sook Lee

Early Life and Education

Min Sook Lee and her family immigrated to Canada from South Korea in 1973, when she was four years old. Her family settled in Kensington Market in downtown Toronto and ran a convenience store near Ossington Avenue and Bloor Street. Lee has said she “grew up behind the counter of the family store.” She has said that her commitment to social justice grew from seeing the hard-working members of her immigrant community facing constant racism and being treated unfairly. “I understood from a very early age to hate the abuse of power,” Lee has said. “As soon as I could, I started organizing with others to create equity.” She became involved in the anti-apartheid movement and has since remained active in fights for social justice and equality.

Lee earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and later graduated with a master’s in environmental studies from York University. She graduated with a PhD in environmental studies from York University in 2019.

“Early on there was an idea of Canada where I didn’t belong and I wanted to challenge that. There is a cultural amnesia that is applied to how the Canadiana story is told and crafted. That, I think, really has been something for me to actively counter and address.” — Min Sook Lee

Early Career

Min Sook Lee worked as a news director at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) campus radio station CKLN from 1996 to 1998. She was then the festival director of the Mayworks Festival of Labour and the Arts from 1999 to 2002.

After working as an assistant to documentary producer Sylvia Sweeney, Lee founded her own production company, Storyline Entertainment, in 2003. She also directed the hour-long documentary El Contrato (2003) for the National Film Board. Focusing on migrant farm workers in Leamington, Ontario, the film’s distribution was threatened for a year following a lawsuit filed by Leamington farmers. El Contrato was nominated for the Donald Brittain Award for Best Social or Political Documentary at the 2005 Gemini Awards. It also won the Cesar E. Chavez Black Eagle Award from the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW).

Lee then worked as a reporter for the short-lived TV station Toronto 1 from 2004 to 2005. She has called the job “a crash course in how to produce media I’d never want. I went from spending three years on one doc to churning out a new magazine-like piece a week,” she told the Globe and Mail in 2012. “It was not me. I was playing at being a reporter.”

Career Highlights

Min Sook Lee enjoyed a career breakthrough with Hogtown: The Politics of Policing (2005). An examination of the impact of political pressure on the Toronto Police Services Board, the film was named the Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the 2005 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Lee followed that with the feature documentary Tiger Spirit (2008), about the reunification of ordinary Korean families separated by the Korean War. It won the award for Best Documentary Program at the 2009 Gemini Awards.

Lee’s subsequent documentaries include My Toxic Baby (2009), about toxic chemicals in baby products; Badge of Pride (2010), about queer police officers; The Real M*A*S*H (2010), about the people and stories that inspired the popular movie and TV series about the Korean War; and The Real Inglorious Bastards (2012), about Fred Mayer and other Jewish European refugees who fought the Nazis through Operation Greenup. The Real Inglorious Bastards won the 2014 Canadian Screen Award for Best History or Biography Documentary Program or Series. Lee was also nominated for Best Direction in a Documentary Program.

Lee’s TVO documentary Migrant Dreams (2016), which serves as a follow-up to El Contrato, follows foreign migrant workers as they resist exploitation by their employers in Ontario. Migrant Dreams won the Canadian Association of Journalists Award for Labour Reporting in 2016 and the Canadian Hillman Prize (awarded to “Canadian journalists whose work makes a difference to the lives of Canadians”) in 2017. The film also received an honourable mention for the Colin Low Award for Canadian Documentary at the 2015 DOXA Documentary Film Festival.

Other Activities

Min Sook Lee co-created the Vision TV sitcom She’s the Mayor (2011) with Jennifer Holness and Sudz Sutherland. It was cancelled after one season.

Lee taught documentary production at the undergraduate and graduate level at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) from 2011 to 2015. She has been an associate professor at OCAD University since 2015. Her area of research and practice focuses on the intersections of art and social change in labour, border politics, migration and social justice movements. She has been president of the OCAD University Faculty Association since 2019.

Also in 2019, Lee made her first foray into politics. For the federal election on 21 October 2019, she was nominated as the New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate in Toronto—Danforth — the riding of former NDP leader Jack Layton. Lee said that her top priorities as a candidate were climate change, economic equity, pharmacare and childcare, improved public transit and more affordable housing. Lee garnered almost 20,000 ballots and 33.2 per cent of the vote but finished second behind Liberal incumbent Julie Dabrusin, who won more than 47 per cent of the vote.

Honours

In 2012, the Mayworks Festival of Labour and the Arts, Min Sook Lee’s former employer, named the Min Sook Lee Labour Arts Award in her honour. She was also the inaugural recipient.

In 2016, Cinema Politica, a non-profit organization at Concordia University, presented Lee with the Alanis Obomsawin Award for Commitment to Community and Resistance, in recognition of “Lee’s long-term commitment to the communities featured in her documentaries.”

Awards

• Cesar E. Chavez Black Eagle Award (El Contrato), United Food and Commercial Workers (2003)
• Best Canadian Documentary (Hogtown: The Politics of Policing), Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (2005)
• Best Documentary Program (Tiger Spirit, shared with Anita Lee, Ed Barreveld), Gemini Awards (2009)
• Min Sook Lee Labour Arts Award, Mayworks Festival of Labour and the Arts (2012)
• Best History or Biography Documentary Program or Series (The Real Inglorious Bastards), Canadian Screen Awards (2014)
• Alanis Obomsawin Award for Commitment to Community and Resistance, Cinema Politica, Concordia University (2016)
• Canadian Hillman Prize (Migrant Dreams), The Sidney Hillman Foundation (2017)