Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s Free Chol Soo Lee does not reinvent the increasingly bloated tropes of contemporary true-crime documentary filmmaking, which in recent years has often stretched simple cases into long-winded and repetitive miniseries that stress the same basic points. This is a story less about finding a criminal than a spotlight on the railroading of an innocent undesirable, which in turn touches on biases in the legal system and the ease with which poor and non-white people are casually thrown into cages to save cops and prosecutors time on proper investigation. Ha and Yi use their film’s compressed, 85-minute running time to focus as much as possible on the emotional turmoil felt by its subject, a Korean immigrant falsely imprisoned for a decade for a 1973 murder in San Francisco’s Chinatown district.
The film begins by laying out the murder and how quickly Chol Soo Lee was apprehended and strung up on purely circumstantial evidence. The first words we hear come from an archival interview where a reporter presumptuously notes to Lee how bad it looked that the man had just received a misdemeanor charge for firing his pistol into the wall of his apartment at the time of the killing, as if that makes a compelling link. The filmmakers then rush through Lee’s trial, mimicking how quickly he was convicted, then double back to give a broader overview of the man’s life to illustrate how, in many ways, a kangaroo court was merely one in a series of indignities inflicted on Lee from the moment of his birth.
The portrait that emerges of Lee is so damning of American anti-Asian racism that it begins with the shattered aftermath of the Korean War, into which Lee is born to an unwed mother. When he arrives in San Francisco, he finds himself lumped into ESL elementary school classes designed solely for the city’s Chinese population, effectively bombarding him with two unfamiliar languages. The frustrations and isolation this bred led him to a number of juvenile incidents. The exposition dump of background details cannot help but feel like mere summary, but the speed at which they pile up helps to impart how Lee could have been on the system’s radar.
Just as quickly as the film builds out Lee, it demolishes the case against him, pointing out that only white witnesses were interviewed by the police and court and that even then the killer was described as Chinese, with Lee swept up in a tacit assertion of the “all Asians look alike” stereotype. When Lee gets a shot at a retrial years later, his lawyers so easily refute the original evidence that the film barely spends time documenting their work, so easily does the tapestry fall apart when a single thread is pulled. Instead, the story of Lee’s fight for freedom is told via the grassroots movement begun in Asian communities to free him. Remarkably, this activism crossed national boundaries, as if Lee transcended his rocky personal life to become a symbol of Asian-Americans finally rejecting the belittling white standards that treat people of wildly different cultures as a monolithic race.
Crucially, however, Free Chol Soo Lee does not then become a triumphant story of a man’s liberation. Instead, the final act becomes a sobering depiction of how time stolen can never be repaid. This is literally true in Lee’s case, as the state offered neither compensation nor even an apology for his wrongful, decade-long imprisonment. But in broader ways, the film illustrates how entry into the American prison system is, whether one gets out or not, a life sentence. Lee, who died in 2014 at the too-young age of 62, is heard throughout the film via archival interview tapes, and he is at his most circumspect when describing his time in San Quentin, despite it being the defining decade of his life. References to having to live by a “convict’s code” set up a confrontation with an Aryan Brotherhood member whom Lee stabs, adding a second murder to his rap sheet that comes back to haunt him even after he is belatedly acquitted of the first. And the psychological wounds all of this left on the man are charted in revelations of his subsequent drug use and an attempted arson that left him horribly scarred by third-degree burns.
Free Chol Soo Lee is ultimately a portrait in absentia of a man who seemed to die long before his obituary was printed. It’s a pointed reminder of the impossibility of a happy ending in a story of wrongful imprisonment, and how America’s penal system is explicitly designed to break a person so completely that even when freed, they are set on a path right back behind bars. The movie’s most chilling moment comes in a recording of Lee discussing his brief but profoundly destructive time on death row for the prison stabbing. In it, he notes that he soon learned that death row was a hell on earth that was kept that way by wardens and guards specifically to encourage suicides, all the better to save the state time and money on mandatory appeals processes. In recounting his time in jail, Lee notes more than once that he himself was tempted to end it all, but he could not share these thoughts with the outside world for fear of demoralizing (and thus demobilizing) his supporters. In the end, even an innocent man must be a model prisoner to stand a chance of release.
Photo courtesy of MUBI
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