Sundance review: 'The Exiles' lets filmmaker Christine Choy tie up loose ends, and speak truth to power about the Tiananmen Square massacre
The documentarian Christine Choy has always spoken her mind from behind the camera — with such classic films as “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” — and in “The Exiles,” she’s just as in-your-face when the camera is in hers.
What filmmakers Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, both New York University class of ’16 and making their first feature film, start out to make is a portrait of their favorite NYU professor. Choy is a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, vodka-drinking Chinese/Korean immigrant who will unload her opinions at every opportunity. She’s also been assigned, by her former students, to watch her old movies — which she says is “better than therapy.”
But soon Choy is confronted with the documentary she never finished. In 1989, after the Chinese military’s massacre of (deliberately) uncounted numbers of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Choy drew an assignment to shoot footage of a group of protesters who escaped China and were exiles in the United States. With a sound engineer along for the ride, Choy filmed these exiles at their first U.S. news conference (in Battery Park, with the Statue of Liberty in the background), at a convention in Chicago for Chinese students living in the U.S., and to an undisclosed location on Long Island where several of the exiles were living two months after the massacre.
And, then, nothing. Choy had reels of negatives, but no money left to finish the project.
And so the reels sat, until Columbus and Klein started going through them and showing them to Choy. What happens next is a quest, to follow Choy as she meets three of the exiles — a charismatic college student, a political scientist and China’s then-biggest tech CEO — to talk about what 30 years away from home has done to them.
The stories of the exiles today are all absorbing, and Columbus and Klein deftly balance the archival footage and the new material (both shot, it should be noted, on Kodak film) to show how much they have changed with age and wisdom.
But the star of “The Exiles” is still Choy, as cantankerous at the end of this journey as she was at the beginning, acerbically noting that China couldn’t get away with killing potentially thousands of its young people without some complicity from international leaders — starting with George H.W. Bush and Henry Kissinger trying to dismiss the massacre as a local issue, and continuing through every president since.
Choy, who turns 70 this year, acknowledges that she will likely never be allowed back into China, where she was born, after “The Exiles” comes out. She also appears to believe, without regret or nostalgia, that it’s a fair price to pay for speaking the truth.
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‘The Exiles’
★★★1/2
Premiered Friday, January 21, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Sunday, January 23, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, probably PG-13 for language and images of bloodshed. Running time: 95 minutes; partly in Mandarin with subtitles.