Free Chol Soo Lee: elegiac true-crime documentary

One June evening in 1973, 32-year-old Yip Yee Tak was gunned down with a .38 revolver on the bustling streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Tak was an advisor to a local criminal gang known as the Wah Ching, but it was Chol Soo Lee, a 20-year-old Korean immigrant with no known connection to the group’s activities, who was accused of Tak’s murder, and would serve a decade in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s debut documentary Free Chol Soo Lee is an act of historical retrieval, and a reminder of how one Korean man – railroaded by the police, the District Attorney’s office, and an over-eager mayor straining to answer for a recent string of Chinatown slayings – became an unwilling symbol of inequity in a country where Asians are still often seen as indistinguishable aliens.

Born out of wedlock in 1952 as the Korean War drew to a close, Lee grew up first in a destroyed Seoul under the care of a kindly aunt before his mother brought him to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she had emigrated 12 years prior after marrying an American soldier. English didn’t come easily to Lee and his relationship with his mother was rancorous; he sought solace elsewhere, working as a barker outside strip clubs and occasionally resorting to theft. After a .38 revolver that Lee had borrowed went off in his apartment, the incident was reported to the police, who dragged him into a line-up, where he was fingered by three white eyewitnesses. From there, his arrest, conviction and sentencing proceeded with Kafkaesque rapidity.

The filmmaking tactics in Free Chol Soo Lee will be familiar to anyone who has seen even a smattering of true-crime/miscarriage-of-justice documentaries over the past decade. Archival elements proliferate on screen without any one component taking prolonged precedence – newspaper headlines, TV interviews, home-video footage, and private photos of its central subject, who with his ’70s-era moustache and wavy hair possessed a piercing, oft-remarked-upon handsomeness. There is even a sparsely animated if ultimately superfluous sequence that recreates an incident in which Lee murdered a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in the prison yard, a self-defensive homicide that landed Lee on death row in 1979, intensifying his supporters’ efforts to free him.

What distinguishes Ha and Yi’s film is the delicacy of their storytelling, their ability to not only draw on but adroitly balance raw visual material and ample verbal testimony to reproduce the sidewalks of Chinatown that Lee slipped in and out of, the cage he was confined to for ten years, and the larger world that alienated him for far longer. Drawing on Lee’s own words, taken from his 2017 prison memoir Freedom Without Justice and given voice by the formerly incarcerated activist Sebastian Yoon, Free Chol Soo Lee never loses sight of the man at its centre, presenting him not as a martyr but as a fallible human being, acknowledging his shortcomings without glib attempts at psycho-analysis.

Gleaning insights and memories from numerous talking-head interviews, Ha and Yi, in collaboration with editors Jean Tsien and Aldo Velasco, capture the unflagging energy and indomitable spirit of the multigenerational Asian-American community that rallied around Lee and ultimately freed him. The portrait of Lee that emerges here is rounded out by the fond but not uncritical remembrances of Japanese-American lawyer Ranko Yamada, a long and loyal confidante who headed Lee’s defence committee, and K.W. Lee, the Korean investigative reporter who took up Lee’s story and became something like a surrogate father to him. These witnesses quiver and fume with an outrage that courses through the film.

Ha and Yi resist the urge to shoehorn Chol Soo Lee’s difficult life into a pat, triumphalist narrative. In the film’s nuanced third act, the pair depict Lee as an outsider who struggled to re-assimilate into an antagonistic society he had never fully blended into before his imprisonment. Battling a severe drug addiction that alienated his closest companions and crusaders, Lee could not cope with being held up as a cause, a paragon of the Asian-American struggle over adversity, and later returned to prison after botching an arson job that left him disfigured.

It is disquieting to watch Lee morph from a beaming and perpetually poised young man into a feeble, hangdog figure gradually receding from the public’s probing eye. When the film’s montage slows and cedes space to the elder Lee, following his emergence from witness protection, we find him still striving to fully articulate his experiences and thoughts; when words fail him or simply skim the surface, the film cuts to his eloquent defenders, ready and able to advocate on his behalf even after all the years of disappointments. The filmmakers might have plumbed this timeframe longer, rather than barrelling ahead to their subject’s untimely passing in 2014, but the impression of Lee as a broken man who struggled to be free in both body and mind never ebbs in its sobering power.

Declining to over-elaborate Lee’s innocence, Ha and Yi’s film stands in defiant opposition to America’s grotesque prison industrial complex. The horrors of incarceration – the corporeal burden and the irreparable psychological scars – are inextricable from the life Lee attempted to live upon his release. Ha and Yi’s alertness to this place their documentary in conversation with broader and increasingly loud calls for prison and police abolition, even as its focus remains pinpointed on Lee. Related by a chorus of voices united in bittersweet memory, Free Chol Soo Lee is a requiem for a man who received the harshest of American educations.

► Free Chol Soo Lee is in UK cinemas from tomorrow.