Christine Choy

Choy was born in Shanghai in the People's Republic of China^[3] as Chai Ming Huei to a Korean father and a Chinese mother.^[4][2]Shortly after Choy's birth, her father abandoned the family to return to South Korea. As a result, Choy was raised largely by her mother. Growing up, her family struggled greatly financially.^[2]

Following the Cultural Revolution, the family fled mainland China via Hong Kong.^[5][2] They moved to South Korea, where Choy was reunited with her father. During this time, Choy developed a strong appreciation for American films released in South Korea. Although she enjoyed the films, Choy became attuned to the prevalence of casual discrimination towards Asian people in American media.^[6]

Choy moved to New York City at the age of 14. "I was a volunteer for WBAI in high school," Choy recounts. "One of my duties was covering the Panther Twenty-One trial at the Tombs." During the trial, she earned the trust of the Panthers and soon afterward, began doing errands for the New York City chapter.^[3]

"I was a Panther Youth," Choy recalls. "I did the running around for the big shots."^[3]

In 1965,^[6] Choy was given a scholarship to attend Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in New York, where she studied architecture. While attending, she made friends with a group of hippies that were a part of Newsreel. At Newsreel, Choy worked as an editor and animation director for some amount of time.^[2] Soon thereafter, Choy earned a Directing Certificate at the American Film Institute.^[7]

Choy has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship, and an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship. Her documentary film Who Killed Vincent Chin? received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1989.^[7] In 2021, the film was registered in the National Film Registry.^[8]

Using her camera to shed light on hidden social histories and injustices, Choy has developed a reputation for fearless filmmaking and uncompromising vision in her push to change and deepen audiences' understanding of the world.^[9]

In 1972, Choy co-founded Third World Newsreel together with fellow filmmaker Susan Robeson. During her tenure, Choy directed documentary films on the 1971 Attica prison uprising, the life of women in United States prisons, and the history of social activism in New York City's chinatown, as well as documentaries on the division of the Korean peninsula and Namibia's struggle for independence from South Africa, among others.^[10]

In 1974, Choy directed her first feature-length documentary, Teach Our Children. Because Choy was able to relate to the poverty and the migration issues that people around her faced, she was inspired to make a second documentary, fusing the issues she faced in China and South Korea with the struggles she faced in the United States. She finished the film—From Spikes to Spindles—in 1976. Its focus was Chinese migration and Chinese citizens' struggle for equal treatment in America.

Choy was one of the first major female Chinese-American filmmakers. She is frequently painted as a controversial figure. She is considered a political filmmaker^[11] and an activist.^[2]

One of Choy's most acclaimed films, Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988), was co-directed with Renee Tajima. The film tells the story of Vincent Jen Chin, a Chinese-American man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by Ron Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, who held Chin defenseless. Neither of the White men served a single day in prison. They were each sentenced to 3 years probation and a $3,000 fine. Choy struggled in seeking funding for this film due to its high-tension subject matter, shedding light on working-class racism in Detroit at a time when the US auto industry was failing, and Japanese cars were gaining popularity. The film was a pioneer in reconfiguring ethnographic filmmaking and won several accolades.

At the 1989 Sundance Film Festival, while there to promote her film Who Killed Vincent Chin?,^[12] Choy shared lodging with Steven Soderbergh, who was in Park City premiering Sex, Lies, and Videotape.^[13][14][15] Also at the '89 Festival, she confronted Robert Redford about Sundance's lack of diversity,^[16] calling the event "white on white" ("white people, white snow").^[13] Who Killed Vincent Chin? was nominated for the Grand Jury documentary award at the Festival; and went on to win a Peabody Award in 1990.^[12]

Choy is well acclaimed for making another film dealing with minority discrimination. Sa-I-gu (1993), another film that Choy codirected, about the effect of the 1992 Los Angeles riots on the Korean American community there, directly deals with the racial animosity towards Asians in America, but more specifically Asian women.^[2]

After decades of directing in the documentary industry, Choy became a professor at Tisch School of Arts in New York City. She has taught a section of the production course "Sight & Sound Documentary" for many years. She also instructs a course called "Directing the Thesis" to third-year students. Additionally, Choy has teaching experience at Yale, Cornell, Buffalo State University of New York, and City University in Hong Kong.^[7][11]

In her time teaching, she has mentored many filmmakers, with a long list of protégés including Todd Phillips, Raoul Peck, and Brett Morgen.^[17]

In 2021, Who Killed Vincent Chin? was inducted into the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.^[8] It had recently been restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation to mark the 40th anniversary of Chin's death. At the time, there had also been a recent surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans in the U.S.^[18]

• 1988, Won: Who Killed Vincent Chin? - Best Documentary, Hawaii International Film Festival
• 1988, Won: Who Killed Vincent Chin? - IDA Award, International Documentary Association
• 1989, Won: Who Killed Vincent Chin? - Asian Media Award
• 1989, Nominated: Who Killed Vincent Chin? - Cinematography Award, Sundance Film Festival
• 1989, Nominated: Who Killed Vincent Chin? - Grand Jury Prize, Documentary Feature, Sundance Film Festival
• 1989, Nominated: Who Killed Vincent Chin? - Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature
• 1997, Won: My America...or Honk If You Love Buddha - Cinematography Award, Sundance Film Festival
• 1998, Won: The Shot Heard 'Round the World, Jury Award, Bangkok Film Festival^[11]
• 2008, Won: "Long Story Short" - Audience Award, Documentary Feature, VC FilmFest - Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
• 2008, Won: "Long Story Short" - Honorable Mention, Documentary Feature, VC FilmFest - Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival^[19]
• 2023, Won: Hot Docs' Outstanding Achievement Award^[20]

• Christine Choy at IMDb
• Catalog of available works from Third World Newsreel