‘Free Chol Soo Lee’ wins Emmy for Outstanding Historical Documentary

It won in the Outstanding Historical Documentary category.

Directed by Julie Ha and Eugene Yi, the film follows a young Korean American named Chol Soo Lee who was wrongly imprisoned for the assassination of Chinese gang leader Yip Yee Tak.

Lee was arrested by the police for murdering Tak in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1973. He was later convicted and given the death penalty due to a lack of support and inaccurate testimonies from white witnesses who were unable to distinguish Asian features, resulting in him ultimately serving 10 years in a California prison before his release. His death sentence sparked the first nationwide Asian movement in the United States, confronting racism against Asian Americans and issues within the criminal justice system, called the “Free Chol Soo Lee Movement.”

The film was also nominated in two other categories of the awards ceremony for Best Documentary and Outstanding Promotional Announcement: Documentary.

“Free Chol Soo Lee” was released on Oct. 18, 2023, and was invited to numerous film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival in 2022 and the Busan International Film Festival the same year. It was also the runner-up for the 2021 Library of Congress Lavine Ken Burns Prize for Film.

The annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards honor the best U.S. news and documentary programs released the previous year. This year’s ceremony for the documentary categories will be held on Sept. 26 at the Palladium Times Square in New York City.

Another documentary involving Korea, “Crush” (2023) was also nominated for the 45th News & Documentary Emmy Awards’ Outstanding Investigative Documentary categories, but failed to take home an award. The two-part Paramount+ docuseries produced by Jeff Zimbalist and Stu Schreiberg tells the story of the deadly Itaewon disaster in 2022.