Christine Choy, a trailblazer for Asian Americans in independent film and whose documentary on the fatal beating of Vincent Chin was nominated for an Academy Award, has died. She was 73.

Choy died Sunday, according to a statement from JT Takagi, executive director of Third World Newsreel, a filmmaking collective Choy helped establish in the 1970s. No cause of death was given.

"She was a prolific filmmaker who made significant films that helped form our Asian American and American film history," Takagi said on the organization's website.

Chin, a Chinese American who grew up in Detroit, was celebrating his bachelor party in 1982 when two white auto workers attacked him. At that time, Japanese auto companies were being blamed for job losses in the U.S. auto manufacturing industry. The attackers were motivated by their assumption Chin was Japanese. His death and the lack of prison time for the two assailants is considered a galvanizing moment for Asian Americans fighting anti-Asian hate.

Renee Tajima-Peña, co-director of "Who Killed Vincent Chin?," met Choy around 1980 through Third World Newsreel. They decided to collaborate on a documentary a year after Chin's death after seeing how little coverage it received.

Tajima-Peña recalls bonding with Choy and other crew during freezing Detroit winter nights while waiting for witnesses in Chin's death and evenings spent with Chin's mother's over home-cooked meals.

"We were in constant motion during the production with Chris always the picture of cool — sunglasses, stylishly slim, cigarette in hand. And yes she was brash and outspoken — her cigarettes may have had filters but her language didn't," Tajima-Peña said in an email to The Associated Press on Friday. "But, her... Read More