Christine Choy Retrospective
Co-presented with Third World Newsreel and Anthology Film Archives. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
Third World Newsreel presents a major fall retrospective honoring Christine Choy (1952-2025), an NYU professor and foundational figure in Asian American documentary. Over five decades, Choy trained her camera on the people the official record overlooked: Chinatown’s garment workers and tenants, incarcerated women, Southeast Asian refugees, families split by the Korean DMZ, and communities across the Mississippi Delta.
The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU is co-sponsoring screenings of From Spikes to Spindles and Fei Tien, Goddess in Flight on Wednesday, September 9 at 8:30 p.m., which will feature a Q&A with Minju Bae (NYU Gallatin) and Mei Lum (W.O.W. Project), and Sunday, September 13 at 6:30 p.m.
Choy co-founded Third World Newsreel in 1972, Asian CineVision in 1975, and the Center for Asian American Media in 1980, taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987), a Peabody Award, and induction into the Library of Congress National Film Registry. This multi-venue retrospective – which will take place at Anthology, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, and the Asian American International Film Festival (taking place at Asia Society) – is anchored by new digital preservations of nine of her pioneering films from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, an act of preservation as resistance that keeps her work, and the histories it holds, in public view at the moment the country tells its own 250th-anniversary story.
Accessibility note: If you have any access needs, please email twn@twn.org.