Free Chol Soo Lee review – impassioned outcry against racial bias and prison cruelty

These days, streaming platforms are laden with identikit true crime documentaries designed to be watched through half-lidded eyes while preparing a sandwich, promptly forgotten about the next day. As such, the fact that Free Chol Soo Lee can emerge as a sensitive, empathetically-made addition to the collection without reinventing the wheel is something of a small miracle. Perhaps this is because directors Julie Ha and Eugene Yi are less concerned with the salacious details concerning the murder that the titular Chol Soo has been wrongfully convicted of. Instead, they use his heart-breaking story to cast a wider net, parsing the importance of grassroots activism and the unreformable, innate cruelty of the California prison system, if not prisons as a whole.

We learn how Chol Soo, a Korean-American immigrant, was set up to fail as soon as he landed on American soil aged six – faced with a series of Sisyphean challenges involving a violently abusive mother and several juvenile institutions that mistook his struggles with English as a mental defect. Things go from bad to Kafkaesque, however, when 20-year-old Chol Soo is arrested and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a local gang member, who was shot in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1973. We learn that local policemen did not bother to interview any of the 40-odd Asian witnesses, only interviewing three white witnesses who incorrectly selected Chol Soo out of a line-up and may have fallen prey to cross-racial identification bias. The police incorrectly refer to Chol Soo numerous times as Chinese, and later, the trial jury members who convict him are exclusively Caucasian.

Chol Soo is confined to California’s infamously awful San Quentin prison, left to fend for himself while alone and isolated among the different warring inter-prison gangs. It is thanks to the work of investigative reporter K.W. Lee, friends, activists, local Korean churches and eventually an entire pan-Asian movement in the United States and abroad that Chol Soo is freed after ten long years.

But we don’t end here. The second half’s graceful handling of tone and storytelling makes this a documentary that feels like it’s working harder than so much of the disposable, exploitative Netflix “content” out there. It is made agonisingly clear how Chol Soo was irrevocably poisoned by the prison system, which he left without so much as an apology from the state, let alone compensation. His distressing descent into drug addiction and poverty, eventually becoming involved in the Chinatown gang scene he was wrongfully accused of belonging to decades earlier, is a twisted full-circle moment that seems to feel horrifyingly inevitable given the poisoned apple that the United States offers to so many. Free Chol Soo Lee is no hagiography, but a documentary that keenly examines the dangers of raising one person up to embody an entire movement of people, and the racist structures that underpin the so-called justice system. “Prison destroys every human dignity,” Chol Soo tells us, and it is impossible to disagree.

Stylistically, this is not a documentary that wants to experiment with form. Talking heads, archival footage, brief animation and nimble editing are enough to hold our attention without feeling restless for a change of pace. When small details are concealed and then revealed at the most emotionally prudent moment, one only hopes that Chol Soo would have given his blessing for the documentary to be made, save it becoming yet another example of his life being exploited.

“I’m not a hero. I’m just a human being.” These words, uttered in archival footage by a broken Chol Soo in one of his final public appearances before his death aged 62, is just one of many moments that strikes you with despair, but Ha and Yi always know to deliver a kicker of hope. Given the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes and ongoing miscarriages of justice today, Free Chol Soo Lee sadly offers plenty of lessons the world has yet to learn from.

Free Chol Soo Lee is released in UK cinemas on 19 August.