HUMAN FLOW (Ai Weiwei). 140 minutes. Some subtitles. See listing. Opens Friday (October 20). Rating: NNNN
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei looks at the global refugee crisis in Human Flow, approaching the topic from both personal and political perspectives.
Accompanied by a small crew, Ai travels around the world to meet displaced people wherever they’ve ended up, letting them tell their own stories and observing the social structures that emerge in camps and makeshift cities.
Ai frequently uses high-altitude drones to show us the massive scale of some of these camps, adding his own puckish touch by letting one drone descend to the ground, turning the specks into recognizable people who each respond to the remote camera in their own fashion.
And that’s the surprising strength of Human Flow: beyond its value as a documentary, it’s a statement of principle. Through his images and his own on-screen actions, Ai makes the case that simple decency can be contagious, and that profound despair can be alleviated – if only momentarily – by empathy and kindness.
It seems insane that people need evidence of this, but they clearly do.
