How misidentifying an Asian man led to a false murder conviction and a movement

SectionstvFeaturedMore From NBCFollow NBC NewsNearly 50 years after a Korean immigrant was wrongfully convicted of a gangland murder in San Francisco's Chinatown, longtime journalists Julie Ha and Eugene Yi have joined forces as co-directors to tell the story of the landmark Asian American movement that exonerated him.“Free Chol Soo Lee,” which premieres Friday at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, chronicles the unlawful conviction, decadelong imprisonment and subsequent release of Chol Soo Lee, a former street hustler who became the symbol for a groundbreaking social movement in the late 1970s and early ’80s.“Both of us have always been attracted to these complex, nuanced stories about Asian Americans, and we just knew we had to dig in and we had to explore what was behind that heaviness,” Ha, the former editor-in-chief of the KoreAm Journal, told NBC Asian America. And at the same time, he kept getting back up and trying, and he endured for so long.”Ha and Yi first began working on “Free Chol Soo Lee” at the beginning of the Trump administration and initially thought that the film could be an “homage to the power of journalism.” But after seeing an alarming spike in anti-Asian racism amid the pandemic, the directors recognized that their latest collaboration — which explores the cultural invisibility of Asians in the eyes of the Western media and judicial system — had an even greater resonance.“We see Asian Americans get erased so easily, sidelined, we don’t get to be fully human, even when the truth tells us otherwise,” said Ha, referring to the 1989 film “True Believer,” loosely based on Chol Soo’s case.