Christine Choy, the pioneering independent filmmaker known for co-directing the Oscar nominated documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?, has died at the age of 73.
According to published reports, Choy died on Sunday, December 7, 2025.
Born in Shanghai in 1952, Choy later immigrated to the United States and became a defining voice in American documentary filmmaking. Her work combined investigative rigor with a deep commitment to marginalized communities, often focusing on race, labor, immigration, and systemic injustice.
Along with Renee Tajima-Peña, Choy co directed Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987) a landmark documentary that examined the racially motivated killing of Vincent Chin in Detroit in 1982 and the controversial legal outcomes that followed. The film traced the failures of the justice system and galvanized national conversations around anti Asian racism. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and remains one of the most important documentaries in American film history.
Her film career extended across decades. Choy directed or produced documentaries such as Mississippi Triangle (1983), which explored racial tensions in the American South, Forbidden City, USA (1989), an examination of Asian American performers in New York nightlife, and In the Name of the Emperor (1991).
Choy also played a crucial role as an educator and mentor. She taught documentary filmmaking at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she served as Chair of Tisch’s Graduate Film & Television Program from 1994 to 1997, and again from 2002 to 2005.
Her last released film credit was as a producer on The Exiles (2022), which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize. Directed by Ben Klein and Violet Columbus, Choy tracks down three exiled dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre to find closure on an abandoned film she began shooting in 1989.
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