“How do I describe myself? Fuck you, how do you describe me?” These are the words of the greatly influential (and highly spirited) documentarian Christine Choy, the central figure of the new documentary, The Exiles.
The Exiles is the winner of this year’s Grand Jury Prize in the Documentary section at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It begins as a biography of Christine Choy, the rowdy, rambunctious, and prolific political activist, whose contributions to documentary filmmaking have helped shaped the art form as we know it today.
Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of her before, as she quickly makes herself known. The Exiles begins as an introduction to and biography of Choy. Loud-mouthed and confrontational, she’s a fiery Chinese woman with Tazmanian devil energy. The kind of person who would become a part of the Black Panther Party for resonating with their efforts to progress the rights and cause of marginalized people (she did).
Judging from her slender, skinny frame alone at first, her singular attitude and swagger it’s not immediately clear. But once she starts talking–cussing up a storm, with a constantly lit cigarette in one hand and her preferred drink in the other (vodka on the rocks)–it’s immediately clear her conviction to be a formidable and passionate activist who inspired filmmakers today.
Directed by first-time feature filmmakers Violet Columbus (Chris Columbus’s daughter) and Ben Klein, Columbus and Klein are both Choy’s students, and Joker director Todd Phillips–a former student of Choy’s–sits for an interview to sing her praise, with Choy bobbing in the background).
It’s a fun intro to meet this wild woman, rocking to the beat of her own drum. As we soon learn, among her many contributions to documentary storytelling, we learn her 1989 film Who Killed Vincent Chin? landed her an Academy Award nomination, but didn’t win in part because there were no Asian members in the branch at the time.
Columbus and Klein then widen the documentary out to show her connection to the historic and horrifying event in Chinese culture that still affects today. With a mix of humor, shock, heartbreak, The Exiles is an accomplished film that entertains and enlightens.
It’s all fascinating and fun to learn of Choy and her story, whose work in political activism got her attention to cover the Chinese student protests, We soon enough learn that one of her unfinished projects was capturing the protests. As history would soon show, this turned into the Tiananmen Square protests. As The Exiles shows, this was not just a protest: the Chinese government turned their military on the students. To this day, there is no account as to how many died (by some accounts, thousands) as bodies were whisked away and cremated immediately.
The Exiles is eventually about Chinese exiles who were ex-communicated from their homeland, and Choy meets the people who she once interviewed years before. They are scattered around the world, the US and France. We see how that historic day forever shaped their lives.
Christine Choy is a staple in documentary work and continues her story today. The fact that this won the Grand Jury Prize should help get more people aware of Choy and the Chinese people.
