For those in the film industry, thinking outside the box often appears to be mission impossible. Actors, particularly after they’ve won an award, are easily typecast. Directors, well, once they have a hit in one genre, are expected to follow suit. Take, for instance, the actor Liu Ye, who is forever cast in the role of weak coward. Or director John Woo, who is stuck with action films despite his decade-long desire to make musicals.

Yet Academy Award-nominated independent documentary filmmaker Christine Choy (Cui Ming Huei) has artfully avoided labels. Although many have tried to define her. The Shanghai-born, 53-year-old might be variously described as “a versatile artist”, “a hip teacher”, and “a prolific activist filmmaker” as well as “an open-minded, free-spoken lady”. Indeed, she’s an attention-grabbing speaker, one who never runs dry of anecdotes.

In the 1970s, Choy gave Tsui Hark (Seven Swords) his first script-writing job after he graduated from the University of Texas. She’s also a good friend of Chen Kaige (The Promise), with whom she often argues politics. But in addition to hobnobbing with the industry elite, she teaches film at New York University (NYU) classroom, where she’s nurtured the talents of then unknowns, such as Todd Phillips, Bianca Jagger and Marla Hanson.

Her own journey began early, at eight she left China for South Korea; at fifteen she left her family to study in New York. Later, after receiving a degree in architecture from Princeton University, and another in urban planning from the Columbia University, Choy, in the 1970s, found herself in New York in the company of a group of anti-everything activist filmmakers from the Newsreel film company. It was there that she learned her craft, producing political and militant films on topics Hollywood couldn’t care less about.

Since then, Choy has made more than fifty non-commercial documentary films on a wide range of issues, and in the process given voice to countless individuals who would otherwise never have been heard (or seen). She’s made films about child care (Fresh Seeds in a Big Apple, 1975); civil rights (Who Killed Vincent Chin?, 1988); kung fu (Shaolin: Art of Zen, 1994); the Nanjing massacre (In the Name of the Emperor, 1995); her family home in Shanghai (Ha Ha Shanghai, 2000); and America’s fear of China (Agent Yellow, 2003), to name but a few.

And along the way, she’s won both critical praise, and numerous awards. More recently, she’s returned to Shanghai, and now works at Shanghai Television.

In our interview with Choy, she discusses her career, filmmaking in China, and her enthusiasm for new projects.

that’s: In addition to your film work, you’ve spent considerable time in University both as a student and a professor. What is your attraction to academia?
Christine Choy (CC): One day I woke up and thought about how I might send my children to university as I had no savings. One of my friends said that if I became a university teacher my children could attend for free. At that time, I had already won some [film] awards and was nominated for an Academy Award. I didn’t care about awards, but universities seem to think highly of them. So I was accepted by NYU. I had never taught at university before and I didn’t know what I was doing. [Yet] I was a very popular teacher back then, because I let everybody smoke in the classroom, drink coffee and take their shoes off. I focused a great deal on internationalization, as I believe creative energy has to come from many different perspectives.

that’s: After teaching, you left New York for Hong Kong.
CC: In 1998, the Hong Kong government wanted to set up a school for creative media and asked me to start it. They just had money and a garage. I was born in a Shanghai house designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, went to America, became an architect and came back here to design a garage! Still, I hadn’t been an architect for too long, so the offer to design a whole school made me feel as if I were in heaven.

that’s: Even so, 2001 was a terrible year for you …
CC: In 2001, my contract in Hong Kong City University was over and I left for the US. Then, 9-11 happened and the whole country became sadistic; it was a nightmare. That year was the worst year I ever experienced. I saw people turn very reactionary; Muslims categorized as evil. It was depressing, but what could I do? I did another three years at NYU and then I took a sabbatical and came to Shanghai.

that’s: Are you here permanently?
CC: I like the idea of Shanghai as my hometown. In any case, the stories in the US have dried up, and there is much that is interesting in China. In England or France for example, it took hundreds of years to get industrialized; China was instantly industrialized. As a result, this country is facing a lot of contradictions, and contradictions make good movies! I am glad China produced 350 films last year; more than Hollywood. A lot of them were garbage, a few were good and some films were loved by the audience, like Crazy Stone.

that’s: Recently, the documentary medium seems to have reached a wider audience. Both Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11 and Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth, for instance, had widespread success.
CC: Scare tactics! They scare you, both Moore and Gore. It’s a very simple formula. Moore is with these gun lovers and describes what’s going to happen and the big man behind it all is Bush, of course! Gore also uses this tactic: “If you don't watch out, you’ll soon see what will happen to the earth -- fifteen years from now, Shanghai will be under the ocean, so let’s do something about it.” It’s all very emotional.

that’s: It’s also very manipulative.
CC: Of course. All movies are manipulative but when it’s manipulative for a good cause I think it’s wonderful.

that’s: You view the documentary film as a quest for truth. That was your aim in films such as Who Killed Vincent Chin?, In the Name of the Emperor and Agent Yellow.
CC: I did. I tried to find an answer. But none of these films actually provides an answer. It gives the audience a direction; audience may decide what is true or not. I give an angle to it, but the angle, of course, is manipulative and is subject to a point of view – mine.

that’s: For In the Name of the Emperor, a film about the Nanjing massacre, you tracked down some Japanese soldiers. How much of the truth did you uncover?
CC: The project began in 1992, but at a time the Koreans and Japanese were investing heavily in China. I couldn’t make the movie at the time because the Emperor of Japan was about to visit China. I was so mad. Later, my producer suggested I go to Shanghai, which is not far from Nanjing. She went to Nanjing, found some survivors and started asking questions. But we couldn’t use their answers because they were uniform. Then I had another crazy idea. I gathered some students from Fudan and Jiaotong Universities in a hotel room, and asked them what they knew about the Nanjing massacre. Guess what? None of them knew anything. Next, a friend of mine who lived in Japan said she knew some soldiers. We went to Japan, very hush hush, drove to a crazy little town in the mountains not far from Tokyo, and went to the soldiers’ homes. After the interviews, I returned to NY, read the transcriptions and found I was sitting on a gold mountain. This was incredible stuff. Later, I got a phone call from an American banker who had some old footage of Japanese soldiers torturing Chinese citizens in Nanjing, and their victims in the hospitals. He gave me that footage. I put it together with the soldier’s testimony. The film was very successful and Iris Chang used the manuscript of the film for her book The Rape of Nanking.

that’s: In retrospect, is it easier to make films in China or in the US?
CC: Financially, it is easier in China because the labor is cheap. But aesthetically the local industry is weak. Their approach is formulaic and they’re not into experiments. In the US, the labor is expensive, but you get what you pay for. A documentary editor in the US costs about USD 3,000 a week and a cameraman about USD 700 a day. But they are really good! And they take their time; they know how to do the details. Here, the editor just needs two days to cut a film. I couldn’t believe it. Soundtrack composition is also weak here. No matter what the film’s subject is, they add piano music or violin solos. Yet China has so many different instruments; it’s musical tradition is so rich, but they never use it. In America, you can mix singing; hip hop; blues; jazz; country music; etc.

that’s: Talk about your current projects in collaboration with the Shanghai television and the Zigen Fund.
CC: The Zigen Fund is a non-governmental organization that has been in China for 20 years. Its main focus is rural areas; they provide educational support to girls from the Miao ethnic minority, for example. At USD 10 a year per person, they have already given support to 17,000 young women, at least up to high school level. None of them were able to go on to college, but they are the first generation of Miao people able to read. The previous generation was illiterate. My film The Shanxi Story deals with rural education in China, while The Guizhao Story is about Miao people and their health issues. In a village [where I shot the film], there is only one doctor. She’s a Miao, trained in Western medicine, but she has to play other traditional roles as well -- she’s a farmer and a mother. She’s a very dedicated woman. I found her story very interesting. It was like a symbol; in times of progress you cannot just get rid of traditions. You need a kind of process so traditions are not cut off. And especially these people, the Miao, who have lived in the same mountainous region for more than 1,000 years. This film is about modernization, what it brings to society, but also about the idea of preserving traditions.

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
Photo courtesy Mick Ryan www.mickryan.com.
August 2007 issue