It’s the closing night at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific American Film Festival and one film — not a new film — really caught my eye this year.
On Saturday, the festival showed the 1987 documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? The documentary is a powerful staple of Asian American history which I had never gotten around to seeing. It is the story of the beginnings of Asian American activism, which came about on the heels of the end of a man’s life. In 1982, Detroit, Vincent Chin got in a barroom brawl with Robert Ebens. Ebens and his stepson then pursued Chin outside the bar; while his stepson held him down, Ebens beat Chin over the head with a baseball bat. Chin went into a coma and died four days later in the hospital.
Read more on looking back, looking forward…
When I was at the Pusan International Film Festival in Korea, I went to a hotel on the beach to meet a documentary filmmaker from Beijing. I was very impressed by his film, Who Killed Our Children.
