The Exiles

To describe documentarian Christine Choy as a bit of a live-wire would be like describing the national grid as a bit of an energy source. "How do I describe myself?" she asks, "Fuck you, you can't describe me." This sort of sparky response is what propels this debut feature from actor-turned-director Violet Columbus and Ben Klein as it flits between being a profile of Choy and her work and a consideration of what happened to the Chinese activists who were exiled in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Back at 1989, Choy - who had been Oscar-nominated for her documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin two years earlier - was drawn to the news story of the Chinese student protests, encapsulated by footage of an unarmed demonstrator standing in front of a tank. How many hundreds died in the subsequent government crackdown still isn't known. Several of the leaders fled to the US and Choy was there with her camera, following them for a project that was ultimately abandoned. Now, 33 years on, Choy and the directors return to this original footage as she goes hunting for three of the dissidents she spoke to for the original film - prominent student leader Wu'er Kaixi, company director Wan Runnan, whose film Sitong spoke out in support of the protests and academic Yan Jiaqi.

In a documentary trend at this year's Sundance - where The Exiles took home the US Documentary Grand Jury Prize - this documentary, like Descendant and [film]Tantura[/film[, puts the past into a direct dialogue with the present. Archive from the late Eighties is played alongside segments from Choy's film - boxed off within a frame so that they are easily recognisable - as Choy travels to Taiwan, Maryland and Paris to speak to the three exiles about their lives since and their recollections of that time.

Considering her old films, Choy notes, "It's like discovering yourself in some ways," and that sentiment seems to extend to the others here as Choy plays the footage for them. Kaixi can't remember too much detail, "We were in a traumatised state," he says, noting that he's surprised at how articulate he was under the circumstances. He, like the others here, including Christine who is "half-Chinese/half-Korean" as well as being American, muses on what it means to be exiled from your homeland, a situation described variously as "a philosophical homelessness" and "personal tragedy" in the course of this film.

The trickiness of the nature of time is brought home in retrospect, with one dissident saying, "I thought we would be able to go back soon", and there's a pervasive sense of melancholy to a film which finds each of the trio still unable to return, although as one puts it, "I still have hope". The Exiles fires along, with editors Connor K Smith and Colton Fordyce keeping a strong grip on proceedings - which also include a handful of quirky animated sections by the wonderfully named Tall Glass With Ice team - so that the pace is maintained without becoming disorienting. It may be freewheeling in its themes and chaotic in its energy but with all these synapses firing at once it is able to alight on connections that more traditional documentaries might miss - and it is all the more engaging for that.