It was a notorious miscarriage of justice: a 20-year-old Korean immigrant, Chol Soo Lee, was found guilty of a Chinatown murder in San Francisco in 1973. But the witnesses were all white and, it became clear, they struggled to tell Asian people apart. Lee became a cause celebre, unifying the Korean and broader Asian communities; his suffering became emblematic of the struggle of Asian people in the US. Finally, he was released.
But, as this impressive and wrenchingly sad documentary explains, that was not the end of the story. Ten years in the penitentiary system for a crime he didn’t commit cost Lee, who died in 2014, more than just a decade of freedom.
