“Free Chol Soo Lee,” a 2022 US documentary a couple of Korean immigrant who was wrongfully convicted in 1973 of murdering a gang chief in San Francisco, received an award on the forty fifth Information & Documentary Emmy Awards.
“Free Chol Soo Lee” received within the Excellent Historic Documentary class through the Emmy Awards, which occurred in New York on Thursday native time, in line with the movie’s distributor, Join Photos. The 4 different contenders have been: MSNBC’s “To Finish All Warfare: Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb,” Nationwide Geographic’s, “JFK: One Day in America,” Netflix’s “World Warfare II: From the Entrance Traces” and PBS’ “America and the Taliban.”
“Free Chol Soo Lee,” directed by second-generation Korean American journalists Julie Ha and Eugene Yi, explores the sophisticated lifetime of Chol Soo, who spends 10 years preventing for his life inside California’s prisons. The 21-year-old immigrant from Korea was sentenced to life in jail after being wrongfully convicted of killing Yip Yee Tak in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He was then sentenced to loss of life for killing prisoner Morrison Needham, although Lee claimed self-defense.
By unprecedented social justice advocacy by the Asian American group, Lee was granted a retrial and his conviction overturned, leading to him being let loose in 1983. He handed away on the age of 62 in 2014, from problems because of third-degree burns sustained throughout an arson assault.
The movie was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in documentary on the 2022 Sundance Movie Competition, the place the film premiered earlier than being broadcast on PBS.
In an interview with The Korea Herald in October 2023, director Yi mentioned that the movie tells the kind of story wherein all of us need to do some self-reflection — not simply concerning the historical past of racism and discrimination towards minority teams within the US, however in Korean society as nicely.
“We predict there’s only a highly effective metaphor that may apply to any society — the place there are folks that you simply may not have a lot in frequent with — to beat these variations and see what we share,” mentioned director Yi.
“Free Chol Soo Lee,” which hit native theaters in October final yr, is at present accessible on Amazon Prime Video.
