Free Chol Soo Lee, review — how bad luck led to a death sentence

Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s multi-faceted documentary recounts a fascinating true crime story that keeps delivering surprises, with sharp storytelling skills and ace editing. Chol Soo Lee, a handsome, charismatic Korean immigrant victim of injustice and horrific bad luck, is seen here in archive footage telling his own story, supplemented by readings from his memoir read in voiceover by Sebastian Yoon.

After a troubled youth in San Francisco, where he was one of the few Koreans in a teeming Asian community composed mostly of people of Chinese and Japanese descent, he was wrongly identified by a bungled police investigation as the killer in a gangland shooting and sent to prison. Things only got worse for him when he ended up killing a neo-Nazi in a prison fight (he claimed it was self-defence), resulting in a death sentence.

Lee finally caught a break when journalists and lawyers took up his cause, writing articles, staging protests and building support from California’s many Asian communities. In the end, his exoneration hinged on confronting white people’s tendency to think all Asians look alike, as well as a simple ballistics check. The film captures the activist spirit of the 1970s-1980s and the many characters involved in Lee’s story, while refraining from any kind of hagiography of its central character. That’s just as well: the film’s shocking third act proves he was a complicated character whose bad luck never ran out.

★★★☆☆

In US cinemas now and from August 19 in the UK