AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY directed by Alison Klayman. 91 minutes. Some subtitles. Screening tonight (Thursday, April 26) at 6:30 and 9:30 pm at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema and Saturday (April 28) at 4:15 pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox 1. Part of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. See listing.
A i Weiwei is unavailable for comment for this story. Which, if you know Ai Weiwei’s story, is a little chilling.
If you don’t know Ai Weiwei’s story, Alison Klayman wants to do something about that. Her documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry seeks to bring the famously outspoken Chinese artist and dissident – already well known in the art world – to the attention of a larger audience in the West. A smart, compelling look at a complex, fascinating man, it took the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and now opens the 2012 Hot Docs Film Festival.
“The film is out there, amplifying his story and his message,” says Klayman from New York City. “And he’s in support of that. But it’s more politically sensitive than an art exhibit, and he has to be careful.”
In Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which follows its subject from 2009 to 2011, he’s preparing a show at the Tate Modern while making his own documentaries about political and authoritarian corruption in today’s China. In the process, Ai makes an enemy of the Chinese government.
The film captures an escalating series of incidents that includes plainclothes surveillance, a physical assault that lands Ai in the hospital for emergency cranial surgery and, finally, his detention for 81 days last spring.
When Ai disappeared, Klayman found herself in the strange position of acting as his advocate in the West, using her footage to raise awareness of his case. An episode of the PBS documentary series Frontline called Who’s Afraid Of Ai Weiwei? was broadcast in March 2011, and shortly after that Klayman spoke about Ai’s detention on The Colbert Report.
“That was such a surreal time,” she says. “It was the first time I ever did an on-camera television interview. I love Stephen Colbert, and I was just so terrified. It was a scary time because we didn’t know what was going to happen to Weiwei.”
Ai was released several weeks later the documentary shows him returning home, apologizing to the gathered crowd and refusing to discuss what had happened to him. When Klayman returned to Beijing to show Ai a rough cut of her documentary, “he couldn’t stop talking about [his detention], he was processing it so much,” she remembers. “But he would not speak about it on camera.”
Klayman first met Ai when she was working as a freelance videographer in Beijing. Assigned by a local gallery to shoot Ai for an exhibition of his New York photographs, she quickly realized there was more to the man than a simple interview could cover.
“I felt like the force of his personality was so clear,” Klayman says. “I felt like if people could watch this unique and personable and charismatic man, they would have a different understanding of China. That was my first feeling: ‘Hey, this guy’s activism is going somewhere. He talks about politics in a very frank manner, his art career is taking off.’ My first instinct was just to get to know him.”
Watching Never Sorry, it’s easy to see why someone would want to follow Ai around. His defiance of authority – leavened by mischievous wit – runs through his body of work. His art delights in tweaking ideas like tradition and honour a famous triptych of photographs shows Ai shattering what he says is a centuries-old Han-dynasty vase by dropping it on the floor.
“I felt that if the film wasn’t funny at times and lacked that irreverence, it wasn’t going to capture what he’s about,” Klayman says. “That willingness not to be serious all the time is a big part of his appeal [to] a lot of young people in China.”
Klayman wound up following her subject into some fairly hairy situations, including a confrontation with police in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, when Ai tried to bring charges against the officer who’d assaulted him on an earlier visit.
“There was a scuffle with the police some plainclothes men grabbed the camera,” she says, hesitating to compare her run-ins with Chinese authorities to anything her subject has endured.
“Sometimes he would have plainclothes officers trailing him – and he would argue with them,” Klayman recalls, explaining that Ai rarely got angry with his monitors. He’d simply ask them, conversationally, what they hoped to accomplish by following him.
“When you see him interacting with the police and authority figures, that’s not the face of big bad China,” Klayman says. “The majority of the people are just cogs in the system. Their main goal is to report back to their superiors that they have accomplished what they were told to do. They don’t care who Weiwei is, you know? They don’t necessarily think he’s even a criminal, or they don’t know why they’re being told to film this guy on this street. I think Weiwei has a lot of compassion for those people as well.”
The earthquake that devastated Sichuan province in 2008 – and the government’s attempt to cover up the shoddy construction of the schools that collapsed in that quake, killing thousands of children – made Ai a crusader.
In addition to blogging about it furiously, he made several documentaries about the scandal and launched an art project in which thousands of Chinese citizens read the names of the dead students.
“It was during his earthquake campaign that he became most popular,” Klayman says. “It wasn’t just university students or human rights lawyers [reading him] – it was waitresses and teachers and parents who were very drawn to what he was writing about. And it’s not surprising that it was also the moment when the government shut him down.”
When his blog was terminated, Ai bypassed the national firewall by taking to Twitter and YouTube, where fellow tech-savvy citizens could find him.
“The platform the internet has provided him is really what set it all ablaze,” Klayman says. “He was the right person at the right time with the right tools.”
Since his release, Ai has dialed back his activism, making fewer direct challenges to Chinese authority while maintaining an international media presence through Twitter and the occasional column in the Guardian.
Earlier this month, in response to police surveillance, he installed cameras in his own home and put the feed online. It’s a form of educated resistance by monitoring himself, Ai is taking control of his position as a person of interest. And by limiting his communications with the West about Never Sorry, Klayman thinks Ai is choosing to be strategically silent rather than be silenced entirely.
“The notion of not seeing his son for 10 years is sort of a way [for the government] to turn the screw,” Klayman says. “A lot of his peers were saying, ‘We can’t ask Weiwei to be like this forever. That would be selfish. He also has to think about what’s important for him.’
“These are very serious risks that he faces.”
Interview Clips
Alison Klayman on the nature of Ai Weiwei’s resistance:
Klayman on her hopes for Never Sorry:
Klayman on how Ai’s Chinese followers seek him out online:
normw@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/nowfilm
