Welcome to POV!
I'm Pete Schwaba, host of PBS Wisconsin's Director's Cut.
Tonight, we bring you a legacy title from the archives of POV.
The film is called Who Killed Vincent Chin?
and it originally appeared on POV in 1989.
The story centers on the murder of 27-year-old Vincent Chin,
a Chinese-American engineer.
The gruesome crime took place
on a hot summer night in Detroit in 1982,
and was committed
by auto worker Ronald Ebens and his, stepson Michael Nitz,
who beat Vincent Chin to death with a baseball bat
in front of witnesses.
Ebens and Nitz mistook Chin for Japanese
during a time when many American Auto workers lost their jobs
due to a growing war
between Japanese and American car manufacturers.
Despite witness accounts,
neither Ebens or Nitz spent even one night in jail.
Who Killed Vincent Chin?
is directed by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pena.
The co-directors are both legendary doc film makers
and incredibly prolific,
having a plethora of awards between them.
Their film was nominated for an Academy Award
and has been restored
by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
and was recently added to the National Film Registry.
In this particular collaboration,
Choy and Tajima-Pena
let their characters tell their stories,
relying on their words and actions,
which allowed the filmmakers
to avoid any unnecessarily needed or manufactured drama.
They let the viewer draw their own conclusions
as to whether the murder of Vincent Chin
was a barroom brawl that went too far
or a racist hate crime.
You can decide for yourself, too,
as we head back to Detroit in the summer of 1982.
Who Killed Vincent Chin?
starts now on PBS Wisconsin,
your home for independent film.