Jeremy Chi’s clearest memories of Christine Choy were of her sharp eye and sharper tongue, both of which he observed from close at hand three years ago as a teaching assistant in her film class at New York University’s Tisch School. “This is so bad,” he recalls her telling a student. Choy went on to critique the “terrible” audio and video quality of his work documenting people without housing and to diagnose the cause as a lack of proper equipment.
He and his peers were taken aback by the directness of Choy, who died last year at age 76. “We’re in a college where a lot of the teaching environment tends to be very encouraging — but she was not like that,” said Chi, who is also a programmer and screener for Asian CineVision. “There’s no bad intention there. She [wanted] her students to be good and to make good work.”
Her most lasting lesson, to both that student and her TA, after all, was anchored in ethics: the appropriate way to navigate the power dynamics between the camera and documentary subject. The student had offered their subject food or money in exchange for profiling them.
Her close observation of such dynamics and her blunt approach to confronting problems were hallmarks of Choy, an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker and co-founder of Third World Newsreel and Asian CineVision. Both are nonprofits that support, respectively, filmmakers of color and Asian American voices in film. From Sept. 9 through 13, Third World Newsreel is hosting a retrospective honoring Choy’s legacy, featuring some of her groundbreaking work from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Modeling being yourself
JT Takagi first met Choy while volunteering at Third World Newsreel, where everyone was encouraged by Choy to pitch in on everything from sweeping floors to grabbing coffee. Takagi, now executive director of the nonprofit and an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, was still in school then. She got a chance to work more closely with Choy when nobody else seemed to have the time to do soundwork on Choy’s film project at the moment. Takagi wanted to learn how to use Nagra, a reel-to-reel tape recorder that was common then.
She learned a lot more than that from Choy and other veteran filmmakers at Third World Newsreel who gave guidance, then allowed her room to figure things out. A strong memory is of Choy’s brashness with documentary subjects, which Takagi says came from a place of empathy and was instrumental to her ability to tell their stories:
“You can’t make a film unless you can get people’s trust that you’re talking to,” Takagi said. “She was able to do that in so many ways.”
One of them was her tell-it-as-it-is humor. In “Ha Ha Shanghai,” the 2001 documentary showcased in the Asian American Film Festival last month about Choy’s return to China on a quest for the deed and title to the home her mother owned before leaving the country in the 1960s. Choy narrates observations such as her mother’s characterization of a subject as a “leech” and “big gossip” as the audience meets the subject for the first time. Choy asks a famous fortune teller if he’s finished during a sanctimonious-seeming fortune reading. When she finds someone she knew from growing up there, she asks, deadpan, “She’s still alive?”
Choy also spends the journey knocking on doors loudly enough to wake whole neighborhoods and unapologetically asking questions. Along the way, she bends some conventional rules of journalism, telling government and administrative representatives they won’t be in the film when they clearly were. Most of these moments were met by laughter at the AAF screening.
Legacy of community organizing
Choy’s greatest impact, though, came from her tenacity in portraying complex social and racial issues and creating space for others to do so as well. Part of that was done through organizing gathering hubs that promoted diverse voices and cross-cultural issues and mentoring Asian Americans.
The other was through directing films about issues that crossed boundaries and intersected with hurdles faced by many marginalized communities. “Namibia: Independence Now!” and “Reorienting Africa,” both of which she co-directed, focused on Zambian and Angolan refugees’ struggles against South African exploitation. A 1971 film she co-directed about the prison riot at Attica, “Teach Our Children,” didn’t just document the deadliest such uprising in U.S. history but asked questions about prisoners’ rights.
“Who Killed Vincent Chin?” the 1987 Oscar-nominated documentary she co-directed with Renee Tajima-Peña, became a go-to for Asian American studies and cinema studies courses and was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. The film looked at the death of a 27-year-old Chinese American man who was fatally beaten by two white autoworkers while celebrating his bachelor party in 1982. At the time, the U.S. auto industry was struggling during a recession as Japanese auto imports rose. According to witness testimony, the workers cursed at Chin and accused his community of being the reason they were out of work.
These are just a few of the films that will be shown in the retrospective, which will take place at Anthology Film Archives and Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film.
“Part of her legacy,” Takagi said, came from her belief that “everyone has a story to tell and everyone should tell their story.”
Some of these films, Takagi said, have become critical pieces of Asian American history. That includes “From Spikes to Spindles,” a 1976 documentary about Manhattan’s Chinatown that captures the community protesting against both police brutality and unfair labor practices in the garment industry. Like many of Choy’s films, it was made with little funding and a lot of volunteer work, Takagi said. It also showcased one of Choy’s key principles that is especially relevant today.
“As you may have noticed, we’re in a period of severe crisis,” Takagi said. “This is probably the right moment for people to be reminded that people have the power to organize and do something about these things.”
We have updated this post with details about the recorder that the Third World Newsreel team commonly used for filmmaking.
