By Ash Wu

Christine Choy, a bold filmmaker whose influential documentaries, including the Oscar-nominated “Who Killed Vincent Chin?,” probed social-justice issues involving Asian Americans and other marginalized people, died on Dec. 7 in the Bronx. She was 76.

Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her son, Fleeta Siegel, who said the cause was cancer. She lived in Lower Manhattan.

A faculty member of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts since 1988, Ms. Choy made dozens of short and feature-length films exploring historical and contemporary events in which race, identity and privilege emerged — and sometimes merged — as themes.’

“Who Killed Vincent Chin?” (1987), about a high-profile hate crime, was co-directed with Renee Tajima-Peña. The film, which aired on public-television stations, received a Peabody Award and became a staple of cinema studies courses. In 2021, the film was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for its cultural significance.

The directors spent years detailing the aftermath of a crime that took place one night in 1982, when two white Motor City autoworkers fatally beat 27-year-old Vincent Chin with a baseball bat in front of a McDonald’s restaurant. Mr. Chin, a Chinese American draftsman for an engineering firm, had been celebrating his coming marriage with a bachelor party at a nearby bar.

The attackers, Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, admitted to the killing, saying they had been drunk. They said racial animus was not a factor, even though they apparently thought that Mr. Chin was Japanese and had cursed at him at the bar that evening, blaming him for car-industry layoffs.

Initially charged with second-degree murder, the men pleaded “no contest” to a reduced charge of manslaughter and were sentenced to three years’ probation and fined $3,000, with no jail time — a ruling that helped galvanize the Asian American civil rights movement. A federal civil rights investigation followed, but the outcome was not a happy one for Mr. Chin’s family.

To read the entire article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/movies/christine-choy-dead.html

Photo credit: Deborah Thomas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons