Christine Choy (1952 - 2025) was a Chinese-American documentary filmmaker, known for her rich portrayals of Asian American life and other marginalised communities, and for co-founding Third World Newsreel.
Choy was born in Shanghai in 1952 to a Chinese mother and a Korean father. She spent most of her childhood in South Korea, but moved to New York City at the age of 14. Though she trained as an architect at university, she found her calling as a filmmaker after watching a documentary about Vietnam during her years as an anti-war activist.
In the early 1970s, Choy and fellow filmmakers created Third World Newsreel, a production company that highlighted social justice stories that were not being told in mainstream media. For half a century, Choy’s camera tracked labour, incarceration, immigration and liberation across the U.S. Oscar-nominated and honoured in the Library of Congress, she documented the stories left out by the official record.
Ahead of our Christine Choy retrospective this month, we look back at Choy’s legacy in the activist filmmaking and documentary world.
From Spikes to Spindles | Dir. Christine Choy | 1976 | 45 mins
This raw, gutsy portrait of New York’s Chinatown captures the early days of an emerging consciousness in the community. We see a Chinatown rarely depicted: a vibrant community whose young and old join forces to resist police brutality and hostile real estate developers. With bold strokes, it paints an overview of the community and its history, from the early labourers driving spikes into the transcontinental railroad to the garment workers of today.
From Spikes to Spindles is playing on 14 October as part of our Christine Choy retrospective.
Bittersweet Survival | Dir. Christine Choy, J.T. Takagi | 1982 | 30 mins
Christine Choy and co-director J.T. Takagi examine the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The film begins with a montage of footage depicting the devastating effects of the war before examining the mixed and often hostile reception refugees experienced, including conflicts with local fishermen in Monterey and tensions with the Black community in Philadelphia’s poorest neighbourhoods. The film also explores their difficulties adapting to life in the U.S. whilst maintaining a sense of belonging and identity.
Bittersweet Survival is playing on 14 October as part of our Christine Choy retrospective.
Mississippi Triangle | Dir Christine Choy, Worth Long, Allan Siegel | 1984 | 110 mins
Newly restored, Mississippi Triangle is an intimate portrait of the Mississippi Delta, where Chinese, African American and white locals live in a complex world of cotton, labour and racial conflict.
The history of the Chinese community, originally brought to the South to work on cotton plantations after the Civil War, is framed against the harsh realities of civil rights, religion, politics, and class in the South. Rare historical footage and interviews of Delta residents are combined to create this unprecedented document of inter-ethnic relations in the American South.
Mississippi Triangle is playing on 17 October as part of our Christine Choy retrospective.
Who Killed Vincent Chin? | Dir. Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña | 1988 | 82 mins
Nominated for an Academy Award in 1989, Who Killed Vincent Chin? is Choy’s most well-known film, and a landmark of documentary filmmaking and Asian American cinema.
It follows the case of Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese-American engineer who was brutally murdered in 1982 by two white men in Detroit. Despite confessing to the crime, the men were never prosecuted. The filmmakers document the aftermath through interviews and archival footage to create a pointed analysis and indictment of the failings of the American legal system, and the systematic racism against Asian Americans that allowed his murderers to go free.
The Exiles | Dir. Ben Klein, Violet Columbus | 2022 | 96 mins
In 1989, Choy filmed the leaders of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement, who had fled to the USA, in the weeks and months following the June 4th massacre.
Midway through production, the project was abandoned and the footage was all but forgotten. In The Exiles, co-directors and Choy’s former students, Violet Columbus and Ben Klein follow Choy as she returns to the never-before-seen archive, and the stories of three key figures – a student leader, an academic and a businessman – who supported the protests and were forced to leave their country. Thirty years later, still living in exile, the three men recall their idealism, their hopes and their sacrifices.
Our Christine Choy retrospective runs from Wednesday 14 October to Saturday 17 October. Explore the programme and book tickets here.