Who Killed Vincent Chin? An Oscar-Nominated Documentary Restored for the 40th Anniversary of the Murder Which Galvanized a Movement
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| Courtesy: PBS |
Detroit, 1982: anti-Asian racism is rampant as Japanese car companies are widely blamed for the downturn in the US auto industry and the resulting economic woes of the Motor City, and Asian Americans are caught in the crossfire as scapegoats and targets for anger. On June 19th of that year, Vincent Chin, a 26-year-old Chinese American, was at his impromptu bachelor party with some friends when one such racist clash with two white auto workers leads first to a bar fight, and then to the two men stalking Chin and his friends to a McDonald’s where they beat him to death with a baseball bat. Despite there being no doubt about the facts of the murder, which was committed in full view of witnesses including a cop, Chin’s killers get off with barely a slap on the wrist: no jail time, and just a $3,000 fine. It is a miscarriage of justice and a shockingly blatant display of systemic racism which sparks and galvanizes the modern Asian-American civil rights movement as we know it. Over the next four years, documentary filmmakers Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña followed the story as Vincent’s mother Lily Chin, aided by a national coalition of Asian-American and civil rights activists, fought to get justice for Vincent, in the form of a federal hate-crime trial. The resulting documentary, 1987’s Who Killed Vincent Chin?, proved to be the ultimate historical document about the crime and the movement that followed, as well as an emotionally-resonant and harrowing portrait of the systemic racism flowing through Detroit in the early-80s, and it earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Now, in remembrance of the 40th anniversary of Chin’s murder (which is also the 35th anniversary of the film itself), Who Killed Vincent Chin? has been freshly restored in HD for the first time, and the new restoration has debuted on-demand via PBS’s POV series.
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| Courtesy: PBS |
Made fairly early in the era of the modern documentary film renaissance (one year before The Thin Blue Line and two years before Roger and Me, for context in a genre that was changing quite a bit at the time in terms of form and narrative structure), Who Killed Vincent Chin? was quite experimental for the late-80s, with a nonlinear structure of repeated loops and recontextualizing narrative threads which challenge the viewer and add even more emotional resonance to the already powerful story. This approach begins with the title: in the literal sense of the facts, there is no mystery about who killed Vincent Chin, and we are reminded of this in the first couple minutes, as the short-and-to-the-point version of the story that would have been seen on the nightly news at the time tells of Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz being confronted by cops who happened to be right there in the McDonald’s parking lot and witnessed Ebens deal the fatal blow. Rather than a statement of mystery, the title is a question intended to make the audience think about complicitness, and structures of racism and bigotry, and the factors at work in early-80s Detroit which set the stage for the murder and enabled it, and then allowed Ebens to basically go unpunished despite being so obviously guilty of such a brutal act. Co-directors Choy and Tajima-Peña have cited Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon as the main influence on how they told the story of Chin’s murder and the events that followed, although the structure they created from this inspiration is very much their own. Who Killed Vincent Chin? continually loops back around to the night of Chin’s murder several times throughout its runtime, while giving us more information, context, and narrative threads to help us understand the events in different ways.
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| Courtesy: PBS |
Unlike Rashomon we aren’t getting strictly different versions of events, but we are seeing the events reframed, with new information that was unearthed later in the process of investigating, or through the perspectives of different parties involved. The film is like the process of peeling layers of an onion, or like the process of a 3D printer going over the outline of an object again and again, filling it in a little more each time until we have the whole thing. Choy and Tajima-Peña exhaustively interviewed nearly every person close to the crime or the case that followed, and also incorporate a wealth of TV news interviews from the months following the crime and Ebens’ slap-on-the-wrist sentencing. We hear from Vincent’s mother, Lily Chin, as well as his best friend who had gone with him that night to the strip club in Detroit where Vincent got into a bar fight with Ebens and Nitz after Ebens starting throwing racial slurs and insults at him. We hear from the police who happened to be at the McDonald’s to witness the crime, and the dancers who witnessed the fight the preceded it. We hear from the judge who chose to barely punish Ebens (and call no witnesses aside from the murderers themselves), as well as a juror from his eventual federal hate-crime trial. We hear from Asian-American activists who rallied around Lily to fight for justice, and from Ebens’ defense attorney. And crucially, we hear a shocking amount from Ebens himself – totally unrepentant and seeming to see himself as the victim of it all – as well as his friends, neighbors, and fellow auto workers. As these various people deliver their various perspectives on what happened on June 19th 1982, we first see the night unfold in the cliff-notes version that was seen on the news at the time. We see it unfold through the lens of the virulent anti-Asian racism that existed among auto workers and the city at large. We see it unfold through the self-pitying and self-serving perspective of Ebens who insists he was nothing but a victim of circumstance who couldn’t help himself. We see it unfold through the pain, existential despair, and righteous anger of Lily Chin and the activists who rallied to her cause. And ultimately we get the most complete possible picture of the truth of that night as the hate-crime trial seeks to pull these accounts together and determine whether racism was the true cause of the murder, and whether it constituted a human rights violation.
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| Courtesy: PBS |
While this structure makes for an extremely compelling narrative and a pretty digestible way to dissect a very fraught web of systemic racism, it naturally makes for a pretty difficult, emotionally-harrowing watch, for which viewers should be prepared (although given the subject matter, this should go without saying). Every time we hear from Lily Chin, it is absolutely devastating and heartbreaking: Vincent’s murder clearly left her a shattered person, and Tajima-Peña and Choy vividly capture her pain and anguish through their intimate cinematography and long, unbroken moments as Lily struggles to find the words to articulate all she is feeling. The interviews with Ronald Ebens are painful in a different way: sitting there with his wife by his side, he tries very hard to convey an image of himself as an aww-shucks, clean-cut all-American guy, who can’t possibly be racist because his daughter used to tutor an Asian kid in school (he actually says that), and who seems to genuinely believe he is the real victim of all of this, and the murder was "just one of those things that happens.” His spin and mental-gymnastics are genuinely infuriating, juxtaposed with Lily Chin’s cries of heartbreak, and testimony from the police officer who witnessed the crime and attests to its brutality. But the filmmakers aren’t here to give Ebens a platform unchallenged, nor are they here to use editing to add any damning emphasis to his words; they are here simply to let him talk, and keep the cameras rolling and he talks some more – giving him enough rope to hang himself, as his good-old-boy façade slips in a few very telling moments, and he says some genuinely jaw-dropping things that do not need any editorial emphasis to be damning. In its first act the film likewise spends quite a bit of time with other auto workers, to give a larger perspective of the climate in the industry at the time, and context for the world which Ebens and Nitz came from. And once again, Tajima-Peña and Choy don’t have to do anything but leave the cameras rolling to get the auto workers to reveal the racism simmering just below the surface of their talk of economic anxiety - somebody sooner or later says the quiet part out loud.
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| Courtesy: PBS |
Watching Who Killed Vincent Chin? in 2022, perhaps the most depressing thing is how little things have actually changed. While the film captures in great detail a very particular time and place, and a very particular instance of systemic racism that existed in the specific conditions of that time and place, it is also a very universal story about issues we still deal with today. Scapegoating a minority group and blaming them for a city’s – or the country’s – economic or political woes is a truly American problem which continues to play out over and over again. Doing that to Mexican immigrants was a huge part of what got Donald Trump elected in 2016, after all, and we all know how Arab-Americans were scapegoated and targeted in the years following 9/11, in a way that has never fully gone away. And of course, this remaster and re-release, and the 40th anniversary remembrance of Vincent Chin, comes just over a year after the Atlanta spa shooting – another horrific hate-crime against the AAPI community – and the anti-Asian racism and scapegoating that occurred during the first year of the COVID pandemic. These events once again have galvanized AAPI activists, and saw a renewed focus on AAPI civil rights, and the violence and systemic racism against that community. Indeed, some of the same activist leaders who were instrumental in the fight for justice for Vincent Chin and were prominent in the film, such as Helen Zia, were once again major figures in the protests and calls for justice in these last two years. Amid all of that, Who Killed Vincent Chin? feels as timely, vital, and relevant as ever, and this rerelease feels just as important for understanding our present moment as for understanding our past.
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| Courtesy: PBS |
The PBS re-release of Who Killed Vincent Chin? comes as part of a larger media initiative memorializing the 40th anniversary of Chin’s murder, in a combination of live, online, and televised coverage. Detroit PBS’s One Detroit series has produced a trilogy of pieces examining Vincent Chin’s (and the film’s) legacy 40 years on: one looking back on the film and its legacy with Christine Choy, Renee Tajima-Peña, and producer Juanita Anderson, one looking at artist Anthony Lee’s new mural memorializing Chin, and one examining where the fight for AAPI civil rights stands today, 40 years after Chin’s murder, but in the immediate aftermath of COVID-fueled racism and the Atlanta spa shooting.
It is here that I must, in the interest of full disclosure, mention that I am the editor of One Detroit, and a Detroit PBS employee, though I am writing this review not in any capacity as a PBS or One Detroit employee (and this review is solely my own opinion, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Detroit PBS or One Detroit as organizations), but just in my private life as a movie nerd who writes these reviews for fun, and genuinely geeks out about documentary content like this. I did not produce or edit the three segments linked above – they are the work of my esteemed colleague, One Detroit senior producer Bill Kubota, and while I can’t be totally unbiased about them, I genuinely think they are great pieces and I sincerely recommend them, especially the one looking back at the film with its directors and producer, which I think provides pretty invaluable context for the documentary. While I was pretty close to that coverage around the 40th anniversary of Chin’s murder, I came to Who Killed Vincent Chin? simply as a film fan and documentary lover – and as one who, I am ashamed to say, had never heard of Chin’s murder, despite growing up in suburban Detroit (although I was born five years after Chin was killed, the same year the documentary came out). Particularly for those who are similarly unfamiliar with this history, the links above are very valuable resources if you want to learn more, and I mean that sincerely, and not just to toot Detroit PBS’s and One Detroit’s horn.
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| Courtesy: PBS |
Who Killed Vincent Chin? is a very strong documentary, which tells an already powerful story using a bold and compelling structure which amplifies it further. The way that Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña use their cyclical, nonlinear structure to raise questions about systemic racism and complicitness is fascinating, and really asks the viewer to engage with the facts of the story and the reality of American society and its deeply ingrained biases. The conversation it starts is not just a conversation about the world of 1982 Detroit; it’s a conversation that feels very relevant now, as this film’s re-release follows so closely on a more recent wave of anti-Asian racism, and a new wave of AAPI activism responding to it. Stylistically and in terms of the social conversation it seeks to raise among viewers, this is a documentary that feels quite ahead of its time. Not to mention how groundbreaking it is that, in 1987, it was a documentary made by a core production team (co-directors, producers, and editor) of entirely women, and predominantly women of color. That’s depressingly rare even now, let alone 35 years ago. For all of these reasons on top of the important story it tells, Who Killed Vincent Chin? is an undeniably important documentary, whose Oscar nomination was well-deserved. After being unavailable for far too long, it is great that the film has finally been restored to modern quality, and can be seen once again. It is available to stream on the free PBS app through July 18th, and after that it will be available as an exclusive on the PBS Passport subscription app until September 19th, hopefully with a physical-media re-release to follow.
- Christopher S. Jordan