The Tragic Story of a Korean Immigrant Wrongly Convicted of Homicide

In 1984, journalist and producer Sandra Gin gained an Emmy for an episode of public affairs programme Perceptions. The earlier 12 months, Chol Soo Lee (a Korean immigrant wrongfully imprisoned for a Chinatown gang homicide in San Francisco) had been exonerated after spending a decade in jail – with 4 years on dying row – and Gin’s programme sought to focus on this miscarriage of justice and the motion it galvanised. A clip from the present, titled A Query of Justice, opens Julie Ha and Eugene Li’s new documentary, Free Chol Soo Lee. “I used to be not an angel on the surface, on the identical time I used to be not the satan,” Lee tells Gin, setting the tone for Ha and Li’s movie, which continues following his life up till his dying in 2014, aged 62. 

Each filmmakers got here to Lee’s story by means of KW Lee, a Korean-American investigative journalist working in Sacramento on the time of his imprisonment, who would go on to be a number one voice within the defence committee that in the end established Lee’s innocence. “I used to be 18 and did an internship at a Korean-American newspaper that he had based, truly impressed by Chol Soo,” recollects Ha. “It was mind-blowing to be taught that there was a Korean immigrant who might be wrongfully convicted in our American justice system, and that it might be the work of a journalist – together with a motion led by Asian-People – to proper this mistaken. That modified my entire world.”

“Eugene and I had all the time been interested in extra complicated Asian-American tales, and wanting to inform them with nuance and depth,” she continues. Free Chol Soo Lee is the pair’s first movie, and was knowledgeable by timing – the journal they labored at had shuttered – and a shared want to proceed this type of storytelling. Having attended Lee’s funeral 9 months earlier, Ha was additional inspired by a way of generational accountability. “I used to be struck by the sensation in that funeral area – a heaviness, one thing past grieving,” she explains. “At one level KW Lee stood up, virtually offended. ‘Why is that this story nonetheless underground? This landmark Asian-American social justice motion, why is it not recognized?’ He simply knew this story and this historical past was vastly consequential and actually singular.”

A six-year venture, the filmmakers have been adamant their work needs to be an entire survey, nonetheless uncomfortable. “That basically was necessary,” says Li, “to inform the total story of Chol Soo, and definitely it appeared like individuals have been prepared to speak about him and the best way he affected them, with a candour which may have been troublesome earlier.” Utilizing archive footage, present-day interviews and animation, the movie subsequently highlights the various lives Lee led, from the childhood trauma of attending a faculty geared in direction of Chinese language-American youngsters, to the difficulties he confronted adapting to life after jail, not solely on account of his incarceration however as a result of celeb he gained and the debt he felt because the face of a motion. Elsewhere the movie unpacks the racism that led to Lee’s conviction – the earliest witnesses have been all white vacationers who mistook Lee for Chinese language – and briefly references the 1989 movie True Believer, a whitewashed retelling of Lee’s story that casts the Asian-American neighborhood as props. 

Additional underscoring the cruelty of those chapters is the Tower of Energy track, You’re Nonetheless a Younger Man. After it’s revealed that it performed within the van that drove Lee to jail, the observe is used intermittently as a car for reflection, whereas Sebastian Yoon, a Korean-American together with his personal experiences of incarceration, humanises passages from Lee’s memoir because the narrator. “For a very long time we felt this nagging insecurity that as a lot as we immersed ourselves within the phrases of Chol Soo, we nonetheless weren’t getting all of it – and we needed him to have company. As soon as Sebastian joined, it felt like all the pieces fell into place. He truly collaborated with us on the script,” notes Ha. 

Central to the movie and what guided the motion that fought for Lee’s freedom is a way of neighborhood. For Li and Ha, it additionally allowed area for a extremely private documentary with fantastic depth. “KW Lee opened a whole lot of doorways when it comes to introducing us to individuals who have been concerned,” says Li. “What was fascinating was [that] everyone had one thing from that second of their lives, as a result of it was so necessary, everyone had a field. There’d be no movie with out this stunning neighborhood archive.” Certainly, the movie’s title itself adopts the mantra that started as a daring protest and later turned a cry of grief, heard at Lee’s funeral in recognition of the ache he carried all through his life. “We realised we may permit this strategy of catharsis for the activists, simply within the making of the movie,” acknowledges Ha. “They’d regrets, wishing they might have helped him extra. They completed their mission of liberating him from jail, an unimaginable feat – possibly a authorized precedent – however many felt they owed him extra. That speaks to their large depth of compassion and humanity.”

Free Chol Soo Lee is out now.