Christine Choy

Christine Choy , actually Chai Ming Huei , (* 1952 in Shanghai , People's Republic of China ) is an American documentary filmmaker (director, producer, screenwriter, camerawoman) and educator with Sino-Korean roots.

Live and act

The native Chai Ming Huei was born in China to a Chinese and a Korean and grew up in China. As a result of the Cultural Revolution , mother and child left the country and moved to the Korean peninsula. Here the young girl discovered her love for (American) film, but also for the first time noticed a latent racism of US filmmakers against Asians, which manifested itself in these films. Christine Choy went to the United States with a scholarship in her pocket. She trained as an architect at Manhattanville College and graduated from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University with a Master of Science degree. Instead of taking up this profession afterwards, Choy traveled to Los Angeles and studied film directing at the American Film Institute . In the period that followed, the Sino-American concentrated on making documentaries from her early twenties.

Her work dealt with a wide variety of topics: Christine Choy shed light on the life of different ethnic groups and races in the Mississippi Delta ( Mississippi Triangle ), revealed the political and social situation in South West Africa, later Namibia under then still South African rule ( Namibia: Independence Now! ) investigated an allegedly racist murder of a Japanese exchange student ( The Shot Heard 'Round the World ), recalled the more than 300,000 murders and rapes of Japanese soldiers against the Chinese by Nanking in 1937 ( In the Name of the Emperor ) and analyzed the situation in Koreatown, Los Angeles, after the black US citizen Rodney Kings was killed shortly before due to disproportionate police violence ( Rodney King: Koreatown Reacts ). For her work on Who Killed Vincent Chin? , the retelling of a crime born of competitive envy and racism to the detriment of an employee of Asian origin in the US auto industry, the makers of this almost one and a half hour production, Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña , received an Oscar nomination in the category Best Documentary .

Christine Choy has produced over seventy works to date and has received over sixty international awards for these partly staged and partly produced documentaries (including in Bangkok, Hawaii and at the Sundance Film Festival). Numerous scholarships such as those from John Simon Guggenheim, the Rockefeller House and the Asian Cultural Council enabled her to work independently. Christine Choy is also a lecturer: she teaches as a professor at New York University and as a guest at Yale, Cornell University and the State University of New York in Buffalo. Guest lectures took the teacher to the Evergreen State College and to Oslo at the Volda Film Institute.

Filmography (selection)

Direction or production or script or camera

• 1974: Teach Our Children
• 1975: Fresh Seeds in a Big Apple
• 1975: Generation of a Railroad Spiker
• 1976: From Spikes to Spindles
• 1977: North Country Tour
• 1978: Inside Women Inside
• 1978: Loose Pages Bound
• 1980: To Love, Honor, and Obey
• 1981: White Flower Passing
• 1982: Bittersweet Survival
• 1982: Go Between
• 1983: Mississippi Triangle
• 1984: Namibia, Independence Now!
• 1985: Monkey King Looks West
• 1986: Permanent Wave
• 1987: Who Killed Vincent Chin?
• 1988: Shanghai Lil's
• 1989: The Best Hotel on Skid Row
• 1993: Sa-I-gu
• 1996: The Shot Heard Round The World
• 1998: In the Name of the Emperor
• 2001: Ha Ha Shanghai
• 2008: Long Story Short
• 2010: Cellar
• 2014: Ghina
• 2016: Rodney King: Koreatown Reacts
• 2016: ReOrienting Africa

Web links

• Biography in Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: Women Film Directors. P. 77. Westport / London 1995
• Biography on table.nyu
• Christine Choy in the Internet Movie Database (English)