Two NFB films honoured at TIFF. Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s The Girl Who Cried Pearls wins the Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Short Film. Min Sook Lee’s documentary There Are No Words receives an honourable mention for Best Canadian Feature Film.

September 14, 2025 – Toronto – National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

Two standout National Film Board of Canada (NFB) productions were recognized at this year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), reaffirming the NFB’s excellence in cinema in both animation and documentary.

Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s stop-motion animated short The Girl Who Cried Pearls has received the Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Short Film, while Min Sook Lee’s deeply personal feature documentary There Are No Words landed an honourable mention for Best Canadian Feature Film at a ceremony held earlier today.

Quotes

“For over two decades, we’ve been proud to create Canadian, hand-crafted films. So, for us, there are few honours that match winning the award for Best Canadian Short Film on the 50th anniversary of TIFF.” – Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski

“This film honours my mother, Song Ji Lee, a working-class immigrant woman who lived and died on her terms. Women like her are often erased from memory, a violence that repeats in life. TIFF’s Honourable Mention ensures a counter-archive, insisting that how we remember the past shapes the present we build.” – Min Sook Lee

The Girl Who Cried Pearls by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski (17 min)
Produced for the NFB by Julie Roy, Marc Bertrand and Christine Noël
Press kit: mediaspace.nfb.ca/epk/the-girl-who-cried-pearls

• The TIFF award is the latest distinction for the acclaimed Montreal-based animation duo, who were Oscar nominees for their 2007 NFB stop-motion short Madame Tutli-Putli. TIFF's Best Canadian Short Film is a qualifying award for the 98th Academy Awards and is one of three jury-selected honours in the festival’s Short Cuts program.
• The Girl Who Cried Pearls is a haunting fable about a girl overwhelmed by sorrow, the boy who loves her, and how greed leads good hearts to wicked deeds.
• The 17-minute short features a star-studded creative team, including Colm Feore (voice), Polaris Music Prize winner Patrick Watson (music) and Olivier Calvert (sound design), with Brigitte Henry as artistic director.
• The Girl Who Cried Pearls had its North American premiere at TIFF, following its world premiere on the opening night of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. The film will be showcased next at three major Canadian festivals: SPARK ANIMATION in Vancouver (September 18–21); the Ottawa International Animation Festival (September 24–28), featuring a special tribute to the pair; and the Calgary International Film Festival (September 18–28).

There Are No Words (98 min)
Produced for the NFB by Sherien Barsoum and Chanda Chevannes
Press kit:  mediaspace.nfb.ca/epk/there-are-no-words

• Over 40 years ago, filmmaker Min Sook Lee’s mother died by suicide. Using her camera, Lee explores long-held silences, unstable memories and unforgettable truths, attempting to understand what happened.
• Confrontational and speculative, this powerful documentary reckons with how trauma fractures memory as Lee revisits the people and places of her childhood in Toronto, Canada, and Hwasun, South Korea, her place of birth.
• A looming figure in this search is Lee’s now 90-year-old father, who met her mother while serving in a national intelligence agency under dictator Park Chung Hee in 1960s South Korea. He is her last direct connection to her mother, although he’s an unreliable narrator with a history of abuse who speaks in a mother tongue she cannot fully understand. Through a fabric of real and imagined histories, Lee reveals that some stories must still be told, even when there are no words for grief.
• Min Sook Lee is an award-winning director whose films include Migrant Dreams (2016), The Real Inglorious Bastards (2012), Tiger Spirit (2008), Hogtown (2005) and El Contrato (2003). An Associate Professor at OCAD University, Lee focuses on counter narratives of resistance and feminist working-class cultural praxis.

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