MISERY ON THE MOVE
Documentary examines lives of refugees fleeing from oppression
A frightening take-away from Human Flow, Ai Weiwei’s worldspanning documentary overview of the refugee crisis: In 1989 there were 11 national border fences, presumably including the one about to come down in East Germany. There are now about 70, with more under construction.
Human Flow is not heavy on talking heads or factoids, though it includes a few of each. Onscreen writing ranges from third-century BC Buddhist scripture to 20th-century poetry and 21st-century headlines.
But mostly, it follows the Chinese artist and activist as he visits refugees, on the move and in camps, throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Ai is often out of shot or at the sidelines, buying something from a vendor or showing a child something on his phone: There’s a suggestion here that all humans enjoy cat videos.
But the sometimes casual construction of the film does not detract from the stories of those who must flee war, starvation or persecution in their homelands. We witness a huge crowd trudging across Greece toward the Macedonian border, now blocked by a wall that started going up in 2015. Italians rescue migrants from overflowing boats in the Mediterranean.
Syrian refugees in Lebanon number more than a million — this in a nation of only six million people. In Kenya, a quarter of a million people, mostly Somalis fleeing civil war, live in the squalid Dadaab refugee camp. Germany hosts about 7,000 refugees in a former airport, the Nazi-era Tempelhof, its massive hangers full of tiny apartments that look like office cubicles, with walls but no ceilings.
The meandering nature of the film is problematic.
It might have been interesting to spend a little more time with one group of people and see where they end up. But this is meant to be a kind of global snapshot — albeit a 140-minute one — with brief touchdowns at the U.S.-Mexico border, Afghanistan and Turkey.
Sometimes the touchdown is literal, as in one haunting drone shot of a refugee camp viewed from high above, the film undercranked so that the dots on the ground seem to scurry like ants.
But as the drone descends, those dots slow and take on the form of individuals. Ai’s message is clear: The refugee crisis may take the form of faceless millions, but each pixel in that image of misery is a human being. It’s a lesson worth remembering, and reflecting on.