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SUNDANCE 2022 REVIEW
THE EXILES
By Danny Munso
The Exiles isn’t simply one of the best and most vital documentaries released in the past decade. It’s also a layered, inventive piece of filmmaking – at once both a biopic and an important historical document about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in China. But it’s most crucially a warning and an alert to present day Americans and citizens of the world about the significance of democracy and the threats such ideals face.
The film is the feature debut of Ben Klein and Violet Columbus who met in 2013 as students at NYU. The professor whose class they bonded in was none other than Oscar-nominated documentarian Christine Choy. The pair set out to make a film about Choy’s life and career until Choy told them she had been sitting on unused footage from a project she never finished: a film about individuals exiled from China for being outspoken against the government in the wake of what happened in Tiananmen Square.
In the first 15 minutes of The Exiles, it’s easy to see why Klein and Columbus wanted to showcase their professor. Choy’s underrated career is not only worthy of a retrospective but her magnetic, outsized, brash personality is a filmmaker’s dream. For someone who has spent her life behind the camera, she clearly belongs in front of it. But the film soon shifts tones and we begin seeing Choy’s unreleased movie about the horrors and the fallout of what occurred on June 4, 1989. Klein and Columbus cut and back and forth from Choy’s 1989 footage with present day meetings as Choy reunites with three of the young men – Wu’er Kaixi, Yan Jiaqi and Wan Runnan – she focused on all those years ago.
Though this is Klein and Columbus’ debut, they – along with their editor Connor K. Smith – deftly handle the narrative complexities that come with such a concept. A story that could have been mishandled by even veteran filmmakers always feels like it’s in safe, expert hands. Klein and Columbus’ next project immediately becomes essential viewing.
It’s enough to make a professor proud. There is a beautiful moment in the film’s final third where Choy is speaking (shouting?) at Klein and Columbus who are off camera. She is asking them how they are going to make American audiences understand what happened at Tiananmen Square? How are they going to make them care? She is still teaching.
Choy’s prompting launches the film’s last and most powerful act, which uses footage the filmmakers shot in 2019 as Congress held a 30th anniversary event to celebrate the bravery shown by the activists who spoke out against the Chinese government. Kaixi is one of the invited speakers and plainly tells members of Congress the harsh truth: that the United States government “betrayed us.” The U.S. government’s failure to intervene after Tiananmen Square or at countless other times is in direct opposition to everything we claim to stand for. Yet the majority of large American corporations are getting further into bed with China with each passing year. It’s the same lack of response occurring now in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. The Exiles and its brilliant filmmakers pull no punches. If only our country did the same.
For more info on The Exiles, visit its official Sundance page HERE.
DIRECTED BY: Ben Klein & Violet Columbus
PRODUCED BY: Klein, Columbus, Maria Chiu
This year the Sundance Film Festival is online – which means you can join in on the fun from anywhere in the world! While some films are sold out – tickets do become available sometimes at the last minute so make sure browse the catalog for a film you’d like to see and check for ticket availability here.
Want to read some interviews with today’s top storytellers? We hope you’ll check out our in-depth interviews or read a cool screenplay in its entirety in Backstory Magazine! You can read us on a desktop/laptop or via our iPad app. You can see Issue 44’s Table of Contents – or we hope you will consider – Subscribing or buying a single issue!
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