Ha and Yi excel at giving us a feel for a man who battled feelings of loneliness and the sense he belonged nowhere.
#Innocent witness korea movie netflix trial#
“Free Chol Soo Lee” shows how blatantly an innocent man was railroaded by a racist system, reminding us that justice works differently when the person on trial isn’t White. Using a ballistics report that was later disproven, the courts found Lee guilty without questioning anyone who could prove his innocence.
Lee was nowhere near the crime, and he had corroborating witnesses, but the prosecutors were looking for a quick victory to combat the public perception that they were soft on crime. Three witnesses picked Lee out of a lineup, despite them saying they saw a Chinese man committing the crime. Meanwhile, Yip Yee Tak was gunned down in the streets of Chinatown. While fooling around with it in his apartment, the gun went off. Since he’d never held a gun before, Lee asked if he could borrow it. One night, he noticed his boss had a gun for protection. After doing a stint in Juvenile Hall, the 21-year-old Lee got a job outside a North Beach nudie bar, soliciting potential patrons. The inability to communicate led to Lee being sent to a psychiatric hospital, his first brush with wrongful incarceration. He had difficultly learning English, as all the ESL classes were for speakers of Chinese languages. Returning 12 years after she’d left him, his mother took him to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where she left him to his own devices. It’s implied that he was the product of rape, and his birth in Seoul to an unmarried woman ostracized her from the family. Nevertheless, backed by impressive performances from the leads, this is still a film that doesn’t sacrifice its pointed message or its entertainment value.Lee’s life was not an easy one. If the murder plot seems less than fleshed out, it’s because the real trial represents a microcosm of the public stigma that is still said to exist within the film’s native audience. INNOCENT WITNESS has been largely praised for its sensitive treatment of autism on screen, and this is because it has a point to be made. While some of this seems to suggest that humanity and the legal system can’t coexist, here the film is arguably at its most didactic. Yet here the script repositions autism as a strength, exposing the unconscious prejudices on both sides of the argument. The final act is primarily a courtroom sequence that relies on some familiar tropes, and it’s here that the film comes closest to exploiting the disorder. Although Ji-Woo is portrayed as being on one of the more extreme ends of the spectrum, playing up the physicality of flat speech of the disorder, there is a studied subtlety to her performance that is exhibited in non-verbal responses to Soon-Ho’s questioning. This is all supported by an excellent performance from the young actor Kim Hyang-Gi, who has most recently starred in a prominent role in the Along with the Gods series. The film is careful to take its time to study Ji-Woo’s intelligence and logical responses, along with her audio/visual sensitivities.
While the actual defence plot may leap over the bounds of believability, mostly because the defence case never feels like it is ever on terribly solid ground to begin with, the strength of Moon Ji-Won and Lee Han’s ( A Melody to Remember) screenplay lays in the interplay between the two leads. As the investigation continues, Soon-Ho has his assumptions tested and learns something about her condition in the process. The only witness to the crime is a Ji-Woo (Kim Hyang-Gi), a schoolgirl with autism. Struggling lawyer Soon-Ho (Jung Woo-Sung) takes on a seemingly hopeless defence case of a woman accused of murdering an old man. INNOCENT WITNESS (증인) attempts to tackle this within the construct of a courtroom drama with surprisingly strong results. While the country has one of the more prevalent rates of diagnoses, numerous sources speak to the massive social stigma attached to the developmental disorder. Top performances all around.Īutism in South Korea is not an easy topic to tackle. A surprisingly sensitive treatment of autism that also posits the radical notion that lawyers are also humans.
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