The Stories We Tell (And Those We Don't): the Making of Free Chol Soo Lee

Department: Film and Media Studies

Date and Time: May 16, 2017 | 11:00 AM-12:30 PM

Event Location: Humanities Hall 143

Event Details


"The Stories We Tell (And Those We Don't): the Making of Free Chol Soo Lee."
with JULIE HA, former Editor-in-Chief of KoreaAm Journal and EUGENE YI, former senior video journalist for the New York Times
Sponsored by the UCI Department of Film & Media Studies
Free and open to the public with limited seating

Come join the students of Film & Media Studies 130 / Asian American Studies 114 "Asian American Documentary Practices" in hosting award-winning journalists Julie Ha and Eugene Yi to discuss their documentary-in-progress, FREE CHOL SOO LEE, about a Korean American death row inmate convicted of a 1973 Chinatown gangland murder in San Francisco, and the activists who led a pan-Asian American movement to free him. The film will explore the complex legacy of this landmark yet largely forgotten Asian American social movement, and how Lee and his supporters would intimately shape each other’s lives, during his imprisonment and long after his release.

Eugene Yi is an editor, filmmaker and journalist, and was recently named a 2017 National MediaMaker Fellow of the Bay Area Video Coalition. Documentary and narrative feature editor credits include Out of My Hand (2015 Berlinale premiere), nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, Grand Jury Prize at the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival; and Farewell Ferris Wheel, premiered earlier this year at AFI Docs, and selected for the 2014 Film Independent Documentary Lab. Yi worked as a senior video journalist at The New York Times, and as assistant editor on Inside Job (2010), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Yi’s print journalism awards include the LA Press Club Award for his oral history of the Los Angeles Riots from the Korean American perspective for KoreAm Journal. He is a native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Brown University.

Julie Ha’s 20-year journalism career spans ethnic and mainstream news and magazine experience. Free Chol Soo Lee marks her first documentary film project. She served as editor-in-chief of KoreAm Journal, a distinguished national Korean American magazine, from 2011 to 2014, during which time she led award-winning coverage of the 20-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. Ha was as a staff writer for the Hartford Courant in Connecticut and the Rafu Shimpo, a Los Angeles-based bilingual Japanese American newspaper, and was a reporting trainee at the Los Angeles Times. Past honors include awards from New American Media and Society of Professional Journalists Connecticut Chapter, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (now Asian Americans Advancing Justice). A UCLA graduate, she is a past board secretary of the Asian American Journalists Association, Los Angeles Chapter, and founding board member of the late ’90s reboot of Gidra, a progressive Asian American magazine that originated in the 1970s.

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