- Welcome to Independent Lens.
I'm Pete Schwaba, host of PBS Wisconsin's Director's Cut.
The world is full of tough luck characters
and movies about such characters.
We'll meet one of them in tonight's film,
Free Chol Soo Lee.
The story of Chol Soo Lee is enough
to make anyone appreciate their own life,
and Soo Lee's early years were as hard as his 20s.
He was a victim of sexual abuse,
and his single mother abandoned him
soon after they emigrated to San Francisco's Chinatown
when he was 12.
The young Soo Lee was left to fend for himself in his new land
and had several brushes with the law.
Then one night in 1973, Yip Yee Tak was gunned down
in an ongoing gang war in San Francisco.
Despite the fact that Soo Lee was nowhere near the shooting
and had witnesses to corroborate his story,
several onlookers who were at the scene of the crime
picked Chol out of a lineup,
identifying him as the "Chinese trigger man."
It's also worth noting that Soo Lee is not Chinese,
but Korean.
Using a ballistics report that was later disproven,
20-year-old Soo Lee was wrongfully convicted
of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Asian investigative reporter K.W. Lee
took a special interest in Chol Sool Lee's incarceration
and wrongful conviction.
Lee's coverage inspired a grassroots movement
led by student activists and immigrants,
which created the Free Chol Soo Lee movement
and eventually overturned Chol Soo Lee's sentence.
Free Chol Soo Lee is directed by Julie Ha and Eugene Yi.
Ha and Yi do a masterful job
of tapping into their title character's mindset
and giving the viewer a sense of Chol's loneliness
and how marginalized he felt throughout his life
due to his at times isolated existence and childhood trauma.
The directing duo achieve this by using a narrator
to read Chol's own words from his memoirs.
They also had access to footage of Chol in interviews,
giving viewers insights into the man
and letting us witness the psychological and physical scars
incarceration can exact on the human psyche.
Chol Soo Lee's story was made into a Hollywood movie
called True Believer in 1989.
Ha said while appreciating
that Hollywood recognized Chol's story
was one worth telling, she took exception to the fact
that the two white lawyers in the film,
played by Robert Downey Jr. and James Woods,
were portrayed as the heroes, when in reality,
the real heroes were journalist K.W. Lee
and the student activists
who worked so hard to clear Soo Lee's name.
In a recent interview,
Ha said she and Yi were aware of Chol Soo Lee's story,
but it was not until she attended his funeral in 2014
that inspired her to make a film about him.
The directors felt his complicated story
needed to be told,
and this film does an excellent job telling it.
Free Chol Soo Lee starts now on PBS Wisconsin,
your home for independent film.