Helen Lee: Between Here and Elsewhere is a special retrospective spotlighting the cinematic world of Korean Canadian filmmaker Helen Lee, whose body of work has deeply explored the female body and memory, sexuality and gender, racial and cultural tensions, and diasporic identity through characters living on the margins.
This program revisits twelve of her works spanning over thirty years—from her feminist classic debut Sally’s Beauty Spot (1990) to Tenderness (2024), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and her only feature-length film The Art of Woo (2001). Together, these short and feature films offer a rare opportunity to rediscover Lee’s evolving cinematic language and political imagination.
Born in Seoul and raised in Canada from an early age, Helen Lee garnered attention with Sally’s Beauty Spot (1990), an experimental film that provocatively unpacks racialized desire and sexuality through a mole on a woman’s breast. Her early narrative films, such as My Niagara (1992) and Prey (1995, starring Sandra Oh), examine the lives and encounters of Asian women in Western society, exploring themes of sexual subjectivity, cultural boundaries, and diasporic identity. In Subrosa (2000), a Korean adoptee returns to her birth country in search of her biological mother; and in Hers at Last (2008), the daily lives of a Mongolian migrant and a Korean artist returning from abroad gently intersect in Seoul. The latter film was part of Ten Ten, an omnibus project marking the 10th anniversary of the SIWFF, featuring contributions from six female directors from Korea and abroad.
Also featured for the first time in Korea are Lee’s more experimental shorts, including M. NourbeSe Philip (1995), a filmic rendering of texts by the acclaimed Afro-Caribbean Canadian writer; Star (2001), a visual riff on the song “When You Wish Upon a Star”; North by Northeast (2019), a symbolic juxtaposition of Hollywood icon Cary Grant and the Hindu goddess Kali; and Into Such Assembly (2019), a cinematic interpretation of poet Kim Myung-mi’s work. These pieces depart from narrative conventions and instead experiment with poetic form and visual language to interrogate identity, memory, gender, and history at the edges of belonging.
Completing the retrospective are three recent works that bring Lee’s themes into renewed focus: Paris to Pyongyang (2024), an essay film reflecting on family separation during the Korean War; Tenderness (2024), a subtle drama set against the backdrop of the Sewol ferry disaster, portraying a fractured father-daughter relationship; and The Art of Woo (2001), a genre-subverting romantic comedy that critiques class, gender, race, and cultural fantasy with Lee’s signature wit and insight.
Altogether, this retrospective is an invitation to engage with Helen Lee’s nuanced and persistent exploration of life lived “between here and elsewhere”—a world of crossings, dislocations, and reimaginings of identity.
