Min Sook Lee, the multiple award-wining, festival-touring documentarian, knows how to ask the questions: directly. The issues at stakes in her films are important facets of our times, including policing in the city and the 'war on crime' in Hogtown: The Politics of Policing, migrant workers moving to Ontario in El Contrato, the disparate realities of the two Koreas in Tiger Spirit, the toxicity of most things around us in My Toxic Baby and the reality of being a gay cop in this country in Badge of Pride.

She relentlessly takes her camera to all parties involved and exposes the issues in a bold and engaging manner. The aesthetics at times complement the subject, especially in Tiger Spirit, a film richly exposing a personal journey and cultural overhaul. She is a curious, involved and important filmmaker. Keep them coming!

Your documentaries are involved in important political and social subjects. Were you always so engaged?

In one way, I've never thought of my subjects as 'important', just kind of bread and butter basic. When I work on stories I'm interested in what it takes to get food on the table, put a roof on your head or keep a family together. I don't feel like I'm a particularly theoretical filmmaker loaded with heavy ideas. I'm most comfortable feeling like I'm in step with every day life as it moves forward.

On a different level on the pure 'P' political level, I guess yes I'm pretty much couched in political stories as that's how I've kind of understood my own life and my own personal experiences. I've always been interested in 'why?' and 'how', but I think the question driving these is 'how can I change this?'. I'm drawn to looking at power. I don't think you can escape a political framework if you pick apart the power pyramids in communities and our lives.

I think my intimate & enduring interest in power is because I was raised in a very strict patriarchal family and I witnessed power exercised in the family unit in a rigid way. My father was a military man and I don't know that he had any skill sets to see family as anything other than an extension of his power as a uniformed authoritarian. That was the internal personal experience but outside the home my father inhabited a very different space as an non-english speaking immigrant who ran a little corner store in downtown Toronto. So I kept seeing power flipped in not incidental ways and I learned to observe the nuances of power and it's affect on people's own sense of self-worth.

So I guess I'm not a 'political ideas' person, but more of a 'political experience' person. My biggest thrill is when people upset power, when that upset is propelled and fuelled by an unstoppable momentum. I keep looking for that thrill. I remember being part of the anti-apartheid marches in the 80's when I was a teenager and feeling like I could actually be part of inciting change. The Toronto school board wanted to cancel an annual conference on southern Africa and I was part of a youth group that organized a sit-in to draw attention to apartheid and the lack of awareness within the school system. We won. We got the conference re-installed.

That was a small battle of what I later realized was a global movement. There was a simple almost mathematical rhythm of action and results for me. I still believe these changes can happen, but I feel like I've grown up and don't approach the situation from an 'absolute', but I expect I still end up at the same place regardless I just now take a lot longer tour getting there.

How has film become your preferred medium of inquiry and expression?

I'm still changing my answer on this one. I know I started making my first doc 'El Contrato' because I wanted people to look at the situation of migrant farm workers in Canada and I wanted to change shit up. And this impulse to kick it up is still there, but I've also been drawn into lots of unexpected territory in terms of my own filmic expressions as an artist and storyteller. I'll never be like some film type who can talk film language.

I didn't study film or go to school for journalism, I'm more attuned to practice and the 'doing' than the 'thinking'. I have no experimental, artsy talents, I cleave close to the core. I think one of my strengths as a documentary filmmaker is that I've always been an observer with an appetite for putting myself in other realities, partly because I keep thinking that the next experience will explain something essential to me about how life happens.

You were given the Cesar Chavez Black Eagle Award for El Contrato for its effect on migrant workers' rights. All your films want its subjects to be accountable, responsible and envision better possibilities. Is that a starting point for you?

I have the fascination of watching something 'happen' and being part of the recorded moment in some part because I'm really aware that the telling of that moment gets compromised by biases and agendas almost the instant it has happened, even in the moment of it happening. But it's like I say to myself 'I was there' and no one else can tell me otherwise, it's quite a wordless transference, and in many ways a very selfish investigation because I keep thinking I can resolve a truth through the act of just being there and the documentary project was a means for me to gain permission to enter that place.

At the outset I entered doc filmmaking to share and create propaganda, but what I've learned gives me a deeper satisfaction is a selfish internal one, about the process I go through in making the doc, the personal discoveries about life and myself and jettisoning myself out of my own head and into someone else's. I feel like a mole festered in a hole and I poke out making short forays into the larger landscape and take what I can chew back into my hole to gnaw on and eventually digest.

Tiger Spirit was tagged a 'reunification roadtrip through the two koreas'. How changed were you after that roadtrip? How much had the country you left as a child morphed?

I don't remember very much of Korea, I left when I was a child of three years of age. All I have are some photos, literal and psychological. All my life Korea has been broken. I'm one of the fallen pieces. I've never known a united Korea. Growing up in my family Korean history was buried in the blood. I knew my parents had lived through some extreme conditions and they lived as though those hardscrabble days were not over. Hand to mouth poverty never leaves you, it just gets interred.

I used to wonder what brought my parents to Canada, why we immigrated. They focused on integration in Canadian society, on lauding Trudeau for his 'generosity' and we took part in the annual Carnival where multiculti folks would trot out their dances and eat their food on plastic. But integration as my parents encouraged was about negation. I think I did imbibe it to a degree but then at some point, you wake up and look in the mirror and say 'wait a minute, I'm not white so why do I act and live and think as thought I am white?'

A colonization of the mind has taken hold of your everyday preceptions. And I think I'd see how as much as you want to play the integration game, even with total buy-in, you'll never win because essentially you'll always be lacking. Fundamentally wanting. So I went through a consciousness phase where I embraced everything Korean but that also came up short.

Somehow I've settled on a place where I can see my value in this bissected zone, I have a perspective that allows me to see a few sides of the division of Korea that don't get alot of play in the telling of how Korea was divided and what that means to live in a country that's been arbitrarily drawn and quartered. Tiger Spirit allowed me to spend a few years travelling back and forth to Korea and filming in both North and South Korea, speaking to both North and South Koreans. Putting some of those pieces in a larger whole was about drawing roadmaps to reunification. Korea is one country. I believe the reunification of Korea is inevitable, but Tiger Spirit was about tracking what kind of tensions would remain pulling the two apart.

Your most recent film, Badge of Pride, talks about the lives of gay cops in Canada, and questions whether the country is as open as it thinks it is. What prompted you to investigate this?

I used to work as a waiter at Sneaky Dee's and I did the night shift from midnight to five am. mostly some erratic characters came in during this shift, but I did have some regulars. A table of very well mannered guys, big/barrel chested, who all drove up in motorcycles, and would eat a full meal around 2 in the morning. They were good tippers and well behaved. But something about them made me feel somehow guarded, or unsafe.

Flash forward ten years later, I am at the Pussy Palace, a lesbian bathhouse in Toronto. I recall the giddiness of that night, it was a first for the lesbian scene and it seemed so delicious - I felt like the world was there. And then I started to hear something, I saw a friend ransacking her locker to clean it out and word on the floor was the police had entered the premises. We were being raided. For what? Who knew.

I went towards the entrance to see what was going on and I caught sight of the coppers in long raincoats who'd come into the party - they were my regulars from Sneaky Dees. Eventually the organizers of the night were charged with liquor license violations, a charge that was withdrawn after a judge ruled that the raid had violated the Pussy Palace participants' constitutional rights and compared the investigation to visual rape.

A few years later I did Hogtown and spent alot of time at city hall looking at the intersection of civilian oversight and police culture. Historically, police culture is constructed as white, male, straight. But that's a problem and we've seen the fallout on our streets. By necessity the police have had to change their makeup, and we do have the most diverse police force ever. But is that enough and having representation from different ethnicities or the LGBT community within the makeup of the force doesn't guarantee that acceptance has been brokered and thats what I set out to explore.

I found two lesbians who were out on the job, one rookie gay male cop and one gay male cop who'd been on the job over a decade and a half who'd been harassed by homophobes at his division and eventually found refuge in a desk job.

Are we as open as we think we are?

No.

In your opinion, what is the best trajectory, business-wise, for a documentary?

I don't know. I guess I'm lucky because I don't spend alot of time charting that strategy which is not one of my strong points. I work with phenomenal producers, Ed Barreveld of Storyline Entertainment and Jennifer Holness of Hungry Eyes Film & Television are both incredible producers who bring creative, business and other strengths to the project. I know it's not easy building and sustaining a relationship of the kind I have with both producers so I value them. But my business advice would be non-business advice - tell stories that matter to you and that keep you from sleeping.

If you were to update Hogtown in 2010 with the upcoming city election, what would you want to address?

I'd love to be filming now. Sadly, the current mayoral race lacks the kind of charismatic candidate like Miller who stepped forward with so much hope. I think though that the outsized characters that populate urban politics remain, and that is what drew me to cover city hall in the first place. So the Giambrone scandal, Mammolitti's stab at the mayoralty and even Bussin calling in to the Tory radio show and refusing to identify herself but being exposed the next day, those to me are the ingredients of tragicomedy.

The paradox of City Hall is that most people interact with services provided by municipal government constantly; sewage systems, sidewalks, street lights and garbage pick-ups; but don't pay any attention to the function of the politics of the city state. Conversely, the federal government routinely receives careful scrutiny and attention - but their benefits are more diffuse. Voter turnout for municipal elections is abysmal, city elections historically draw as little as 30-35% of the populace.

A mayor has an emotional appeal that's more communal, even family-like than the Prime Minister. I would love to be filming at Toronto city hall again, because it brings me back to the question that I keep returning to: ' How is the open face of power mobilized and expressed?'

What project are you working on as we speak?

I'm working on two different productions. One is a comedy series I co-created with Jen Holness and Sudz Sutherland called 'She's The Mayor!' for Vision TV. The series is built around a woman, Iris Peters, (mid 60's) a political neophyte who runs for Mayor and unexpectedly wins. Iris is an unlikely Mayor, she's stubborn, willful and prone to outbursts that get her in alot of trouble. Despite her lack of experience, she ends up running the city better than it's ever been run before. The series allows me to deal with the leftover love I have for city politics from my time shooting Hogtown.

I'm also working on a documentary for History Television with producer Ed Barreveld about the historical realities behind the television series MASH. We've interviewed the stars of the show from Loretta Swit to Jamie Farr to Gary Bughoff and have also gotten some incredible interviews with the real life doctors, nurses and helicopter pilots who were stationed in the hospital units during the Korean War. It's a great way to access history through a cultural lens most people are familiar with and then stay with the history.

See also: Behind the doc - Min Sook Lee