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

Nearly 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. “It just felt like the story needed a release.”