Each year the Happening invites a featured filmmaker to present his or her work to participants. This year's featured guest is the Oscar-nominated filmmaker and Chair of Graduate Film and Television Department, New York University, Christine Choy.
The Documentary Film and Video Happening, presented by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Program in Film and Video at Duke University, welcomes Christine Choy as this year’s featured filmmaker. Choy, a vanguard filmmaker who has completed more than fifty films since 1972, is best known for the Academy Award-nominated Who Killed Vincent Chin?, Ha Ha Shanghai, Homes Apart: The Two Koreas, and The Shot Heard ’Round the World, among other works. Choy’s films have been shown around the world, including a special tribute at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and screenings at Sundance, Cannes, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Athens International Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival.
"In addition to being an internationally known documentary filmmaker, Christine Choy identifies strongly as a teacher," says Dawn Dreyer, public programs and publicity coordinator at the Center for Documentary Studies and director of the Happening. "Choy’s experience and knowledge will benefit documentary filmmakers at all levels. Her presence will be felt throughout the entire festival."
Born in Shanghai, Choy left China for Korea at the age of nine. Choy’s father had already left China for his home in Korea. "It was 1962 and no one was allowed to leave China. My mother wrote a letter to Chairman Mao entreating that it was important for our family to be reunited. Somehow, we got a visa." When her mother got permission to leave, she gave their house to the government in exchange for the money she needed to travel. Choy returns to Shanghai after a thirty-year absence to reclaim her home in her documentary Ha Ha Shanghai, which opens this year’s Happening. The screening will be on Friday, November 8, at 7 p.m. in the Richard White Lecture Hall on Duke’s East Campus.
Choy arrived in the United States as a high school student, and went on to train as an architect at Princeton University and receive a master’s degree in urban planning from Columbia University. At Columbia, "students were making films and I thought it was fascinating, but they didn’t want to include me. The majority [of them] were white, male, upper middle class. They were making films about poor people and prisons. I thought it quite peculiar," she recalls.
When Choy turned to filmmaking, "my architecture background was useful. I wasn’t afraid of machines, and the concepts of light, composition, shades, and shadow all apply to filmmaking. When you design a building, you need a creative team. Making a film is also very much a collaborative process. Logistically, it’s quite similar. Eisenstein and Kurosawa were architects. So it was an intellectual progression for me."
Choy’s screen debut was in the mid-seventies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with From Spikes to Spindles, a documentary on the migration of Chinese immigrants from the West Coast to New York’s Chinatown. The receptionist at the desk thought she was a messenger and wouldn’t let her past the front desk. "I waited for an hour. I was outraged. Ultimately, I went outside and made a phone call. . . . I demanded to see the entire board of directors of the Museum of Modern Art to make my complaint. He [the film programmer] was very apologetic. The film was shown at the museum and it was very well received. Since then I’ve been a filmmaker and I’ve never stopped."
Choy is currently the chair of the Graduate Film and Television Department at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. The founding director of the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, she is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Peabody and an Academy Award nomination, and fellowships, including a Rockefeller, a Guggenheim, and a Mellon. She is also a founder of Third World Newsreel, a network of radical filmmakers committed to activism and to developing artists and audiences of color.
The Happening, an annual event now in its seventh year, brings together novice and experienced filmmakers and videographers, faculty, and documentary enthusiasts for workshops, presentations, discussions, and screenings of curated and submitted documentary film and video pieces. For more information on the Happening, please go to http://cds.aas.duke.edu and click on the Happening logo, or contact Dawn Dreyer at dkdreyer@duke.edu or 919-660-3680.
EVENTS WITH CHRISTINE CHOY
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8
Brown Bag Lunch with Christine Choy, sponsored by the Asian American Studies Working Group. Duke Multicultural Center, Bryan Center, Duke University’s West Campus. Noon.
Opening Night Screenings, Richard White Lecture Hall, Duke’s East Campus
Ha Ha Shanghai (2001, 72 min), 7 p.m.
Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988, 82 min), 9 p.m.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9
Richard White Lecture Hall, Duke’s East Campus
The Dos and Don’ts of Documentary Work: Workshop with Christine Choy, 1:30 p.m.
Pixelslingers and Storytellers: Internet Distribution and Documentary Work, 4:30 p.m.
Choy will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Nancy Kalow.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10
Center for Documentary Studies
Works in Progress: Christine Choy, 12:30 p.m.
Choy will screen her current work in progress and share a sampling of her other work.
Screening Session, 2:15 p.m.
Choy will lead a session focused on the work of Happening filmmakers.
FILM DESCRIPTIONS
Ha Ha Shanghai (2001, 72 min)
Ha Ha Shanghai recounts Choy’s Kafkaesque travails as she tries to recover her family home in Shanghai from its current residents and the protective obfuscation of government bureaucrats. Choy’s mother had abandoned the family’s house when she left China for Korea in the early 1960s. Choy, who returns to Shanghai for the first time in more than thirty years, weaves together encounters with childhood friends, glimpses of Shanghai’s pre-revolutionary culture, and revelations about her own past. But her real, though largely implicit, concern is with the unreliability of first-hand testimony, the traps of nostalgia, the unbridgeable distance between the present and our reconstructed memories of the past.
Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1988, 82 min)
A film by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima
"This film burns through the mind long after it has left the screen."—New York Post
This Academy Award-nominated documentary examines the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese American, by Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz. Chin was celebrating his last days of bachelorhood in a Detroit bar. Ebens, an unemployed autoworker, believed Chin to be Japanese and blamed Chin for his own lack of work; an argument broke out between the men. The fight moved outside and before onlookers, Ebens beat Chin to death with a baseball bat. In the ensuing trial, Ebens was let off with a suspended sentence and a three thousand dollar fine. Outrage filled the Asian American community, and they organized an unprecedented civil rights protest. The Los Angeles Times described Who Killed Vincent Chin? as "a haunting, disturbing and utterly compelling account of a multi-layered tragedy."