“Christine [Choy] Has Always Been a Person Who Puts Her Ideals into Action”: The Exiles Directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein

The first rule of documentary film? “Lie to everyone.” This from no less an authority (and anti-authority) than Christine Choy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) and educator (NYU, Cornell, Yale, etc.), founding director of Third World Newsreel, and straight-shooting (no pun intended) civil rights rabble-rouser. (Once during the US Film and Video Festival – soon to be rebranded Sundance – Choy even pulled Robert Redford aside to bluntly ask what was up with all the white people and white snow.) And now she is the cigarette-puffing central character in Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s The Exiles, which is executive produced by Violet’s father, the filmmaker Chris Columbus, Eleanor Columbus and Steven Soderbergh. In the duo’s auspicious feature debut (world-premiering in Sundance’s US Documentary Competition), Choy serves as guide to a horrific buried history – purposely in China’s case, narcissistically in ours (a “self-interested nation” is Choy’s candid assessment of her adopted homeland). That’s the history of the 1989 Tianamen Square protests and subsequent massacre in Beijing. It was during this upheaval that the Shanghai-born Choy decided to train her lens on the leaders of the fledgling democracy movement, specifically three men of different ages and backgrounds: a firebrand student, a prominent academic and a corporate CEO forced to flee to the US. Thirty years on Choy tracks down the trio (now living in Taiwan, Maryland and Paris, respectively) to share with them footage from the project she eventually abandoned. And to find out whether the personal price they’d paid for what would turn out to be an international political betrayal had ultimately been too high. Fortunately, Filmmaker was able to catch up with the co-directors just prior to the film’s January 21st Sundance launch to learn all about shooting The Exiles, the exiles, and the iconoclastic whirlwind at the center of it all.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.