Why Ai Weiwei was compelled to take on the global refugee crisis in his new documentary
Ai Weiwei may be China’s most famous contemporary artist and a prolific social justice activist. But at his core, Ai insists, he is simply an observer.
He’s a wanderer too. Not to mention a relentless documenter — of the Chinese communist government, of international human rights violations, of the 40-some cats that roam his Beijing art studio and of the longtime team members who populate his Berlin art studio, a 150-year-old underground beer cellar.
Tonight it’s the moon that has captured Ai’s attention.
He arrived a few hours ago at LAX and now strolls languidly across his agent’s Beverly Hills office courtyard, repeatedly stopping to take photos of the sky.
“Beautiful half moon,” he says, breathing in the floral-scented night air.
He takes pictures of his agent’s lobby and pictures of a framed picture on the lobby wall. Each time, he extends his arm without breaking his stride, briefly eyeballing the viewfinder from afar, an unemotional, matter-of-fact gesture: capture the moment.
In 2016, an accumulation of moments from the better part of a year resulted in his new documentary, “Human Flow,” a sweeping chronicle of the swelling refugee crisis. Ai and his team criss-crossed the globe, visiting more than 40 refugee camps in 23 countries and banking about 900 hours of footage for the film, which premiered in September at the Venice International Film Festival and screened at the Telluride Film Festival.
In one scene, travel-weary Turkish refugees spill out of rubber boats washing ashore on a beach in Lesbos, Greece, in the dark of night; in another, thousands from Syria and Iraq slog along a mud footpath headed toward the Greek-Macedonian border, gravel crunching beneath their feet. In southern Italy, African refugees from Nigeria, Sudan and Senegal huddle under gold Mylar blankets that glisten in the moonlight and crinkle in the breeze.
This is not an abstract art film, as one might expect from the man who filled a vast space in London’s Tate Modern with 100 million hand-sculpted and painted porcelain sunflower seeds. Nor is it a straightforward, journalistic documentary. It is a tragic travelogue of sorts.
There may be talking heads in “Human Flow,” such as Jordanian Princess Dana Firas and Syrian astronaut Mohammad Fares, and there are snippets of factoids about the more than 65 million people worldwide escaping war, persecution, climate change and famine. But they unfold over lush, ambitious visuals shot with a variety of cameras including drones and even Ai’s iPhone. The film is studded with the kind of iconic imagery present in much of his contemporary art — mounds of battered life vests, thermal blankets, fragile rubber boats.
“It’s incredibly beautiful and aesthetically complex and layered and textured,” says Participant Media’s Diane Weyermann, an executive producer on the film. “But he didn’t set out to make an art film; he set out to make a film about humanity. It’s a story about the global refugee crisis made by an artist.”
“I want people to be emotionally involved,” Ai says over dinner. “The hope is for individuals to realize these refugees relate to our normal life and we have a responsibility to act.”
As he speaks, Ai is a mix of contradictions: gentle, soft-spoken and cherubic-faced with a Zen-like air of calm, but also a brazen human rights activist with a quick sense of humor who is not immune to the allures of posting blow-by-blow accounts of his day over social media. Except instead of avocado toast studies, his feed might include pictures of Al Gore, Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning. He oozes sensitivity and machismo at once.
“I try to keep intimate relations with what we call our life,” Ai says of his ceaseless documenting, “because very often we don’t understand our life. We think we are living inside our [lives], but we don’t really understand.”
‘Starting from zero’
As a multimedia political provocateur, Ai’s studio has made some 20 films, both shorts and long form, largely championing human rights and freedom of expression. Many have been DIY efforts and most have been distributed on Ai’s YouTube channel. The online activism landed him in hot water with the Chinese government, which in 2011 accused him of vague economic crimes, confiscated his passport and jailed him. They called his internet activities subversion of state power and he was held for 81 days, much of that time in solitary confinement. When his passport was returned in 2015, Ai moved to Berlin, where he now lives.
By then he’d been studying the plight of refugees for some time. But he wanted to go deeper. He traveled to a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos, the well-known way station for refugees, and began filming the tiny boats arriving from Turkey with his iPhone. The scene was so active and the images so strong, he set up a small studio there. He didn’t plan to make a feature-length film. It came from his pressing curiosity to better understand the refugees’ journeys.