Christine Choy Retrospective

Third World Newsreel (TWN) presents a major fall retrospective honoring Christine Choy, co-founder of Third World Newsreel and an iconic figure in Asian American documentary. For 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 separated between North and South Korea, and communities across the Mississippi Delta. The retrospective brings nine of her works (including newly preserved films) to the big screen, continuing TWN’s “Preservation as Resistance” campaign which began with A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde that kicked off the year. The campaign demonstrates the importance of archival preservation during a time of systematic erasure.

Screenings began in July, via MoMA’s “Immigrant Nation” series, and a tribute at the Asian American International Film Festival, presented by Asian CineVision at the Asia Society on August 2. The retrospective runs September 9-13 at Anthology Film Archives and September 13-16 at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, with additional venues to be announced as the program builds toward international distribution.

Since Choy’s death in December 2025, PBS’s POV has called her “a fearless storyteller and pioneering voice in Asian American cinema,” and NYU Tisch Dean Rubén Polendo remembered her as “a triumphant force in documentary filmmaking.” JT Takagi, Choy’s longtime collaborator and Executive Director of Third World Newsreel (TWN), said: “Christine helped build Third World Newsreel into a home for the stories the mainstream wouldn’t touch. Her work helped form our Asian American and American film history, and her films have urgent things to say amid today’s anti-immigrant sentiment. Bringing them back to the screen is how we sustain her legacy of honest, impactful storytelling about the communities the record overlooked.” In addition to her work at TWN, Choy also co-founded Asian CineVision in 1975, taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, earned an Academy Award nomination for Who Killed Vincent Chin?, a Peabody Award, and was inducted into the Library of Congress National Film Registry. The nine films in the retrospective span nearly two decades of Choy’s filmmaking, they include:

Teach Our Children (1972): A landmark of movement cinema, Choy’s first film, co-directed with Susan Robeson, documents the 1971 Attica prison uprising from the point of view of the incarcerated rebels. Preserved thanks to the efforts of UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, MIAP alumna Pamela Jean Smith and Cinemalab.

From Spikes to Spindles (1976): An early chronicle of New York Chinatown’s history and burgeoning activism. The film interweaves the history of Chinese immigration and racial oppression with the community’s efforts to organize. Preserved by BB Optics, Inc with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF).

Inside Women Inside (1978): Through firsthand accounts from incarcerated women in New York and North Carolina, the film offers an early and unflinching look inside U.S. women’s prisons. Preserved with support from NYWIFT Women’s Film Preservation Fund.

To Love, Honor & Obey (1980): The film examines domestic violence across class and ethnic lines through the voices of survivors and the counselors who work with them.

Bittersweet Survival (1982): Co-directed with JT Takagi, the film portrays Southeast Asian refugee resettlement in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Fei Tien: Goddess in Flight (1983): Adapted from Genny Lim’s play, this fiction short traces an intergenerational friendship in New York Chinatown.

Mississippi Triangle (1984): Preserved in 2025, the film portrays Black, Chinese, and white life in the Mississippi Delta through footage shot by three separate crews, each representing the specific POV of the three respective communities portrayed. Preserved by BB Optics, Inc. with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) and the New York Women in Film & Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF).

Namibia: Independence Now! (1985): Co-directed with Pearl Bowser, the film documents Namibia’s anti-apartheid liberation struggle from exile.

Homes Apart: Korea (1991): Made with JT Takagi, the first U.S. project permitted to film in both North and South Korea, it focuses on the 10 million family members separated by the DMZ. As tensions rise now in Asia, the human cost of the still unresolved Korean War resonates.

The communities struggling for justice in Choy’s films, from immigrants and refugees to incarcerated people, offer crucial perspectives on historical movements whose struggles persist today. Themes of jingoism and exclusion remain woefully apt amidst elevated levels of anti-Asian hate crimes and intense militarized immigration policy.

For TWN, preservation extends past the archive: the preserved films get projected now, and audiences and partners carry them forward into classrooms and future bookings. Keeping Choy’s work in circulation continues the conversations her films began.

The Christine Choy Retrospective will launch with two newly preserved films, “From Spikes to Spindles,” preserved by BB Optics, Inc. with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) and the New York Women in Film & Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) and “Mississippi Triangle,” preserved by BB Optics, Inc with support from NFPF. Third World Newsreel’s archiving and preservation projects receive partial support from the New York State Council on the Arts’ Small Capital Improvement Grant for Arts and Culture. Lunette is co-presenting this retrospective with Third World Newsreel.

Full schedule and tickets: https://www.twn.org/exhibition/christine-choy-retrospective