From Spikes to Spindles

The career of iconic and influential poet and writer Audre Lorde is seen up until death.

A personal journey by Oscar nominee Christine Choy discovering the impact of Chinese Development in Africa.

A matter-of-fact documentary of the massacre of over 300,000 Chinese civilians by the Japanese in the so-called 'Rape of Nanjing' in 1937. In the name of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, the desperate soldiers, enraged by intense Chinese resistance, stormed the then capitol of China and over a six week period systematically raped, tortured, and killed many of the inhabitants of that city. This is a matter-of-fact although polemical documentary, with many of the horrifyingly intense images taken from home movies made by an American missionary who was there.

Brash and opinionated, Christine Choy is a documentarian, cinematographer, professor, and quintessential New Yorker whose films and teaching have influenced a generation of artists. In 1989 she started to film the leaders of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests who escaped to political exile following the June 4 massacre. Though Choy never finished that project, she now travels with the old footage to Taiwan, Maryland, and Paris in order to share it with the dissidents who have never been able to return home.

A revolutionary political moment is captured firsthand by two independent women filmmakers shooting inside refugee settlements in Zambia and Angola in 1985. Depicting the significant role of women in this struggle for independence, this film explores the lives of exiled women workers attempting to free their country from illegal exploitation.

America Undercover goes to the Madison Hotel in the skid-row section of downtown Los Angeles and talks to some of the desperate people living there. It talks to a prostitute and heroin addict named Becky, a drug dealer and traveler names John, and an heavy drinking alcoholic named Jack Woodrow Wilson.

This is an intimate portrait of life in the Mississippi Delta, where Chinese, African Americans and Whites live in a complex world of cotton, work, and racial conflict. The history of the Chinese community is framed against the harsh realities of civil , religion, politics, and class in the South. Rare historical footage and interviews of Delta residents are combined to create this unprecedented document of inter-ethnic relations in the American South.

This film exposes the daily humiliation regularly faced by women in U.S. prisons using firsthand accounts of inmates at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women and the Correctional Institute for Women at Riker's Island, New York.

In 1992 the filmmaker Christine Choy returned to Shanghai for the first time in over thirty years: to track down the title of her family’s house that her mother abandoned on leaving China for the U.S. in the early 1960’s and to locate an old schoolmate. This is a documentary journal recorded over a period of eight years.

The film investigates the death of Japanese exchange student Yoshi Hattori, killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on October 17, 1992.

Since its 1988 premiere, this critically acclaimed documentary series has presented hundreds of films that put a human face on contemporary social issues by relating a compelling story in an intimate fashion. "POV" has won virtually every major film and broadcasting award available, including 38 Emmys, 22 Peabody Awards and three Oscars.

This film recounts the murder of Vincent Chin, an automotive engineer mistaken as Japanese who was slain by an assembly line worker who blamed him for the competition by the Japanese auto makers that were threatening his job. It then recounts how that murderer escaped justice in the court system. Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, in association with the Museum of Chinese in America. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, with additional support provided by Todd Phillips.

This documentary examines the re-settlement of South-East Asian refugees in the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The film begins with a montage of riveting footage depicting the devastating effects of the war. It then unveils the mixed reception given Vietnamese refugees in the United States, from battles with local fishermen in Monterey, California, to conflicts in Philadelphia where their arrival in the city's poorest neighborhoods kindled resentment in the Black community. The film also explores their struggle to cope with life in the U.S. and maintain their identity.

They speak the same language, share a similar culture and once belonged to a single nation. When the Korean War ended in 1953, ten million families were torn apart. By the early 90s, as the rest of the world celebrated the end of the Cold War, Koreans remain separated between North and South, fearing the threat of mutual destruction. Beginning with one man's journey to reunite with his sister in North Korea, filmmakers Takagi and Choy reveal the personal, social and political dimensions of one of the last divided nations on earth. The film was also the first US project to get permission to film in both South & North Korea.

When a student filmmaker turns the camera on his professor, Christine Choy, her eccentric behavior and unconventional wisdom force him to reconcile his ambitions with the ethics of documentary filmmaking.

Based on the play, "Pigeons," by Ginny Lim, this film focuses on the meeting between an older immigrant and younger American-born woman living in Chinatown. The linkages in their pasts and possible futures unfold as their friendship grows.