Helen Lee

Helen Lee was born in Seoul, Korea and lives in Toronto, Canada. At the University of Toronto, she was awarded the Norman Jewison Fellowship, earned a Master's Degree in Cinema Studies at New York University, and is a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre. She attended the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program where she was tutored in Critical Studies by Homi K. Bhabha and served a directing internship with Atom Egoyan during the making of "Exotica." Her acclaimed short films, "Sally's Beauty Spot" (1990), "My Niagara" (1992), "Prey" (1995), and "Subrosa" (2000) have screened at numerous festivals and events worldwide. Her essay, "A Peculiar Sensation: A Personal Genealogy of Korean American Women's Cinema," was published in Dangerous Women: Gender & Korean Nationalism (Routledge, 1997) and reprinted in Screening Asian Americans (Rutgers, 2002). Helen’s feature debut, the romantic comedy "The Art of Woo" (2001) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and is distributed by Odeon Films (AllianceAtlantis). She mounted a performance-based video installation, "Cleaving" (2002) at the Werkleitz Biennale in Germany where she was a guest of the DAAD’s Kunstlerprogramm in Berlin. Helen is currently at work on a number of projects including a film based on her aunt Insook Kim’s Korean War memoir, Oh! Take Me Back to the Motherland (Daehae, 1999); an adaptation of Kerri Sakamoto’s award-winning novel, The Electrical Field (Knopf, 1998); and an original screenplay entitled "Desolation Sound" which she will direct. (09/20/02)

My Niagara
A film by Helen Lee, 1992, 40 min., Color
Grasping the texture of half-expressed desire, this beautifully drawn drama evokes the complex dislocations of an Asian American woman. Shadowed by th...

Prey
A film by Helen Lee, 1995, 26 min., Color
The morning after a break-in at her Korean immigrant father's convenience store, Il Bae, 20-something and strong-willed, catches a hunky shoplifter-on...

Sally's Beauty Spot
A film by Helen Lee, 1990, 12 min., Color
A large black mole above an Asian woman's breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and racial difference in this engaging experimental film. Offscreen...

Subrosa
A film by Helen Lee, 2000, 22 min., Color
SUBROSA traces a young woman's journey to Korea, the land of her birth, to find the mother she's never known. This exquisitely crafted drama probes th...