Who Killed Vincent Chin? with Renee Tajima-Peña
Saturday, 10:15 am, Regal Downtown #3
Directors: Renee Tajima-Peña, Christine Choy
Cinematographer: Kyle Kibbe
Running Time: 87 min
In June of 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat outside a Detroit strip club by Chrysler plant superintendent Ronald Ebens and Ebens’s stepson, Michael Nitz. Motivated by their belief that the decline of American automobile sales was the fault of the Japanese, the two men attacked their Asian victim, who happened to be Chinese. Despite the fact that Chin was held by Nitz and beaten repeatedly in the head by Ebens until his skull was visibly fractured, the two men received only three years of probation and a fine of only $3,000.
Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s 1987 Academy Award–nominated documentary explores the events leading up to the murder and following the trial’s surprising verdict. More than a simple regurgitation of the case, it sets out with the question posed by the film’s title to show the greater sociological setting of the incident. By studying the conditions of the people working in the plants and the effects of the Japanese automobile industry on Detroit, the documentary attempts to explain why an incident like this could have come to pass. Perhaps the boldest touch of the film’s narrative is that, despite the unnerving emotional detachment of Ebens when interviewed, the filmmakers draw connections between Vincent and Ronald’s pasts. Both men moved to Detroit in hopes of finding better jobs, managed to “fit in,” and yet collided in tragedy.
Twenty-five years later, as America grapples with new incidents of racial stereotyping such as the post-9/11 murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh mistaken for a Muslim because of his turban and beard, this trenchant documentary provides an invaluable exploration of blind and diffused animosity toward an abstract other.
