My Toxic Baby

Salute to Asian Canadian Filmmakers

Screening Time
Sunday, May 30, 1:00pm

Film Trailer

Documentary / Canada / 2009 / 46 minutes
Writer/Director/ Narrator: Min Sook Lee
Producer: Ed Barreveld
Website: www.mytoxicbaby.com
Language: English

One mother’s search for safe, sane and affordable ways to raise her child in a toxic world

I’m a new mom who’s had to make some basic parenting choices for my daughter Song Ji. I breast feed. Luckily she picked it up right at birth. But I have used baby bottles too. A recent study found plastic baby bottles leach bisphenol A, a developmental, neural, reproductive toxicant linked to exposure to cancers, impaired immune function, early onset of puberty, obesity, diabetes, and hyperactivity, to name a few. The caution list continues. Petroleum products in her bath rinse; I can’t pronounce half the ingredients that are in her diaper rash cream. The teething toy she sucks on has orange plastic filled with liquid. Some manufacturers have removed PVC from their products, especially those intended to be put into children’s mouths. But no law requires or regulates these products and few are labeled. But My Toxic Baby isn’t a cautionary tale telling you the ‘do’s and ‘don’t’ of healthy parenting. This is a personal essay that aims to broaden the options that are made available to parents in the context of the chemical world we livein today.

Festival Entries
Official Selection, Earth Day Film Festival (2010)
Official Selection, Toronto International Film Festival (2009)

About Min Sook Lee
Min Sook Lee is an award winning documentary filmmaker. Her body of work includes Hogtown: The Politics of Policing (Best Feature-length Canadian Documentary, Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival 2005), El Contrato (Gemini Award nomination for Best Social/ Political Documentary) and Tiger Spirit, a reunification road-trip through the two Koreas (finalist, Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival 2009; Gemini Award nomination for Best Social/ Political Documentary). Her short docu-poems Borderless and Sedition have played at international festivals. Min Sook was also presented with the Cesar E. Chavez Black Eagle Award for El Contrato’s impact on the rights of migrant workers. Badge of Pride, her documentary on gay cops was released in 2009.