Sundance review: 'Free Chol Soo Lee' tells how a wrongful conviction of a Korean immigrant sparked a movement to fight injustice

In the documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee,” filmmakers Eugene Yi and Julie Ha examine how a movement among Asian Americans to battle injustice emerged from one man’s troubled life.

In 1973, Chol Soo Lee was a 20-year-old Korean immigrant living in San Francisco’s Chinatown, with a criminal record. After a man was shot dead in a Chinatown intersection, part of an ongoing gang war. Cops arrested Lee, and he was tried and convicted — based on the testimony of white tourists who later admitted they couldn’t distinguish Asian features — and given a life sentence in San Quentin.

Four years into his prison term, he was attacked by a member of a white gang, whom he killed in what his lawyers argued was self-defense. An all-white jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to the gas chamber in San Quentin.

While he was in prison, activists began to mount a campaign to free Lee, to expose the racism and shoddy detective work in the San Francisco Police Department. The campaign became a unifying event among Asian Americans in California and across the country. It helped that Lee was a charismatic interview subject, handsome and smiling as he discussed the wrong done to him by the system.

Yi and Ha have compiled a wealth of archival material, and fresh interviews with the people involved in the campaign — the most compelling being Ranko Yamada, a friend of Lee’s before his arrest, who went to law school and became a lawyer so she could be fight for Lee’s freedom and other cases of injustice.

Lee’s voice is heard in interviews, and in writings narrated by Sebastian Yoon. His words paint a portrait of a man who felt almost cursed in life, both before his arrest and through his imprisonment.

The film works because it finds the tricky balance between describing Lee’s hard life and exploring how his prison experience inspired a movement that was bigger than he was — and how he struggled to live up to those expectations.

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‘Free Chol Soo Lee’

★★★1/2

Premiered Friday, January 21, and screened again Sunday, January 23, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. No further screenings are scheduled on the festival portal; it will screen in seven cities as part of the Satellite Screens program). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for descriptions and images of violence, and references to drug use and sexual assault. Running time: 86 minutes.