‘The Exiles’ Review: Tiananmen Square’s Legacy Intersects with a Filmmaker’s Life in an Eccentric, At Times Essential Doc

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang Given the Chinese government’s frighteningly successful attempts at retroactively erasing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from history, there is an urgent need for a soup-to-nuts retelling of that incident, solidly laying out the facts and figures, insofar as they can be known. “The Exiles,” from debut directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, is not that film, although some of its most powerful sequences could be repurposed in their entirety to that end.Instead, Columbus and Klein present a palimpsest of erratically overlapping perspectives.

The results are untidy and unbalanced, but derive considerable energy from that eccentric approach. While “The Exiles” honors three of the erstwhile leaders of the protest movement, and also probes some intriguingly melancholy ideas about exile and the passage of time, a significant portion of its hybrid vigor comes directly from the enormously outspoken, rather amazing Christine Choy, the filmmaker who becomes the framing device here.

Shanghai-born, half-Korean and now American, Choy is a self-confessed “loudmouth” whose 1987 doc “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” was Oscar-nominated after playing, like this film, at Sundance.

She’s an NYU professor whose habit of smoking and swigging vodka through her lectures is recounted fondly by friend and former student Todd Phillips.