“You can write about it, but Americans don’t read.” A firm non-believer in spoon-feeding, Academy Award-nominated documentary pioneer Christine Choy (“Who Killed Vincent Chin?”) may very well never set foot in her home country of China again. “How the f*ck can I explain to anyone where I’m from?” maintains Choy, born to a Korean father who abandoned the family shortly following her birth. “F*ck you! You describe me!”
Identity, as it pertains to nationalism, is an issue that plagues many former Chinese citizens — specifically those who were in the country during the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, which left a number of political activists, many of them students, exiled from the country for actions deemed radical by a totalitarian government. Appalled by what she witnessed, Choy — then coming off an Oscar nomination for “Vincent Chin” — began shooting a documentary film called “The Exiles,” which included footage from the first Congress of Chinese Students that assembled in the U.S. on July 28, 1989.
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Unfortunately, Choy ran out of both film stock and funding and later became a film professor in New York City. Todd Phillips was one of her students, and he briefly (and somewhat distractingly) pops up for a minute to praise her as essential to his educational upbringing, describing her as incredibly “non-conventional” — i.e. chain-smoking cigarettes even though the classroom had no windows. Now, 30 years after the fact, directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein have given Choy a chance to reflect back on the old footage she captured and assembled it into an updated hybrid documentary project that is sometimes reminiscent of Sandi Tan’s “Shirkers,” with its Super 8 and 16mm, film-within-a-film structure, bifurcated in its authorship and sets of footage.
While its structure is a little lopsided (the beginning portion plays like a doc about Choy) and the tone tends to sway somewhat harshly between justifiably acidic and politically enlightening, “The Exiles” is an essential look at “philosophical homelessness” and an expert example of documentary cinema as a truth-telling device. Though film may be a medium built on illusion and lies, image-based reporting is often the only way to shine a light on certain issues in order to shake the larger populace awake these days — empowering the voiceless by exploring the perspectives of active spectators who were wiped from the history books.
Traveling to Taiwan, Maryland, and Paris, Columbus and Klein follow Choy as she reconnects with three of the prominent (formerly young) leaders of the post-massacre movement: Wu’er Kaixi, Yan Jiaqi, and Wan Runnan. Wu’er Kaixi became a political commentator in Taipei and would later testify at the 30th-anniversary hearings for the Tiananmen Square tragedy in Washington D.C., in which he accused the U.S. of aiding in the creation of “concentration camps at the world’s appeasement.” The portions of the film that point fingers at the hypocrisy of the Bush and Clinton administrations — unwilling to put democratic, human ideals before diplomatic headway — aim to place some of the blame for our Trumpian present on long-standing political complacency, and while it’s certainly apt, it feels like the least developed of all the thesis arguments in the film despite being an extreme point of passion for Choy.
“United States [citizens] are chickenshits. It’s a very self-important nation,” Choy rightly says, but, again, this arm of the doc isn’t as provocative as the material in which the exiled subjects discuss their ongoing frustrations around censorship and injustice, reflecting not only on how little has changed since 1989 but on the fact that virtually every nation, except China itself, includes the massacre in their school curriculums. Yan Jiaqi has written 1,300 essays on the subject that have had almost no impact on the Chinese Mainland at all, though they did make small waves in Hong Kong and Taipei.
Wu’er Kaixi looks upon his younger self and is taken aback at how articulate and composed he was at such a young age. As a result of his activism, his family has been forbidden from traveling abroad going on 28 years now. Choy asks about the whereabouts of another man in one of her old photos and is told that he passed away while living in Los Angeles. The doc stresses how capitalism’s very nature is to pit people in competition against one another, and it does a more successful job revealing the fallout of globalization than it does in taking aim at its progenitors.
One of the fundamental principles of democratic rule is the right to criticize the ruling class. Actor Jodi Long describes Choy as a “combative loudmouth,” but her crass and confrontational manner also provides a method for enacting social change via exposing systemic biases and corruption. Choy believes “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” never had a fair chance at the Oscars: “The documentary branch, I think [had two Asian members]” she explains, while realizing the futility of even trying to campaign back in 1989. The narrative was never about fame, it could simply lead to job security — though certainly not back in the country which she and her fellow exiles were born. [B/B-]
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