Remembering Christine Choy: A Pioneer of Asian American Documentary Film

Documentary filmmaker Christine Choy recently passed away at the age of 73, as reported by The 19th. Her death marks the end of an extraordinary career spent bringing much needed attention to marginalized voices and systemic injustice.

While her filmography included over 85 works, Choy is perhaps best remembered for the 1987 documentary, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, which tackled the murder of Chinese American autoworker Vincent Chin and became a landmark work exposing anti-Asian racism and hate crimes in the United States. It earned her and co-director Renee Tajima-Peña an Oscar nomination and was so culturally significant that it was inducted into the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 2021.

Born in Shanghai, Choy moved to New York City at 14 and quickly immersed herself in activism, becoming involved with the Black Panther Party. This revolutionary spirit defined her art. She was a key member of the activist collective Newsreel (later Third World Newsreel), making films about critical social movements, including the 1971 Attica prison uprising (Teach Our Children) and the lives of those in women’s prisons (Inside Women Inside).

Choy served as a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, mentoring numerous acclaimed filmmakers, including Todd Phillips and Raoul Peck. She was also known for her advocacy for industry diversity, often pushing back on institutions she found too white and insular. The 2022 film The Exiles, directed by two of her former NYU students, captured her unapologetic nature, including the famous story of her challenging Sundance founder Robert Redford about the festival’s lack of diversity. Choy recounted telling him: “This is not White on white… White people on white snow.”

Christine Choy provided a necessary blueprint for telling uncomfortable truths, and her films will continue to serve as essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand the history of civil rights and race in America.

When reflecting on what it means to be a filmmaker, Choy once said, “The spirit of the documentary filmmaker is that you have to take a position — even if it might be jeopardizing your family, your fortune. But you have to take a position. Otherwise, who else is gonna do that?”

Photo by Deborah Thomas/Public Domain