Mark Rudd, the 1960s activist, remains one of the most haunted, and haunting, figures I’ve ever encountered on a movie screen.
One of the protagonists of then-San Francisco filmmaker Sam Green’s 2002 Oscar-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, Rudd confesses — in the middle of a lonely, windswept hike/interview — his profound regret at embracing violence, and his unmitigated sadness at the failure of the student antiwar movement to change American society.
Wu’er Kaixi, Yan Jiaqi and Wan Runnan, the subjects of Ben Klein and Violet Columbus’ valuable documentary The Exiles, may have a similar effect on you. The three men were important figures — student leader, professor and writer, and high-tech executive, respectively — in the peaceful pro-democracy movement that swept China in the late 1980s. After the army massacred hundreds of students in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, Wu’er, Yan and Wan were compelled to flee, winding up in New York City.
That was where Chinese and Korean American documentary filmmaker Christine Choy met them. She was hardly the only person with a camera to attend their press conferences, notably public outdoor affairs with the Statue of Liberty in the background. But based on the vintage footage that comprises the idealistic heart of The Exiles (opening Dec. 9 at the Roxie for a week), Choy shot the most eloquent individual interviews, along with a relaxed, candid group sit-down.

That long-ago nighttime chat session featured plenty of Tsingtao, but the participants were mostly intoxicated on their no-longer-illicit freedom to speak. They were (naively) convinced, like revolutionary predecessors in the U.S. and elsewhere, that their country’s path to democracy was unstoppable. And that, naturally, it would just be a matter of time before they could return to their beloved home.