Mississippi Triangle
Christine Choy · 1984 · 110 minutes
An intimate portrait of life in the Mississippi Delta, where Chinese, African Americans, and whites live in a complex world of cotton, labor, and racial conflict. The history of the Chinese community, originally brought to the South to work on cotton plantations after the Civil War, is framed against the harsh realities of civil rights, 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.
Film 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).
Program note coming soon.
Christine Choy aka Chai Ming Huei (1952-2025) was born in Shanghai in 1949 to a Chinese mother and a Korean father. She spent most of her childhood in Korea, but at 14, she moved to attend her Korean Catholic school’s sister school in New York City. After graduating from high school, she pursued architecture and urban planning at Washington University in St. Louis and Columbia University. An anti-war activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Choy found her interest in filmmaking sparked by a documentary about Vietnam.
In the early 1970s, after their previous collective, Newsreel, disbanded, Choy and a few fellow filmmakers created Third World Newsreel, a production company that focused on creating documentaries that highlighted stories that were not being told in mainstream media. Among the first projects Choy took on as co-director were Teach Our Children (1972), about the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion; From Spikes to Spindles (1976), about injustices faced by garment workers in New York’s Chinatown; and Inside Women Inside (1978), about inmates in women’s prisons in New York and North Carolina.
After receiving her Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video in 1982, Choy spent her Fellowship year working on a documentary about the contentious relationships between the white, Black, and Chinese communities in the Mississippi Delta. The result was Mississippi Triangle (1984), a critically celebrated film that provided a far more nuanced view of Southern race relations that had been typically portrayed.
On the heels of Mississippi Triangle, Choy went on to pursue the film that would become her most well-known. Who Killed Vincent Chin? is a documentary about the fatal beating in Detroit of a 27-year-old Chinese American draftsman, Vincent Chin, at the hands of two white Motor City autoworkers, who had accused him of the recent spate of car-industry layoffs, believing him to be Japanese. The film was nominated for an Oscar in Best Documentary Feature in 1989 and won a Peabody Award in 1990. In 2021, it was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.
Choy went on to direct and co-direct many subsequent films, including Homes Apart: Korea (1991), about families divided by the border between North and South Korea; “Sa-I-Gu” (1993), about the 1992 Los Angeles riots from the perspective of Korean American women in the city; and In the Name of the Emperor (1995), about the massacre known as the Rape of Nanking.
In 1988, Choy became a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she was a beloved faculty member. The Exiles, a documentary about Choy and her attempt to complete a film about the Tiananmen Square massacre, made by two of her students at N.Y.U., won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2022. Choy died in December 2025.