Ai Weiwei’s refugee docu opens in Venice
VENICE: An impatient toddler chides his mother for not being quick enough in getting him into his pair of newly-acquired boots.
Finally they’re on, and he wriggles free to put the new footwear to good use: kicking his siblings and friends on the shins.
He might be a refugee, detained in a transit camp with the rest of his family, waiting to hear what the rest of his life might hold in store for him, but in that moment, he is just an irrepressible little boy with new boots.
Ai Weiwei chuckles at the memory of the scene. It was one of many warmly humorous moments that he captured on film as part of Human Flow, an epic 23-country documentary essay on the global refugee crisis that required a crew of 200 people to put together, and had its international premiere at the Venice film festival on Friday.
It is the kind of humanising detail that the celebrated Chinese artist finds lacking in mainstream media coverage of the migration story that has dominated news agendas over recent years in much of the world.
“It is a challenge when you are making a film,” Ai said here.
“You see daily news footage about the tragedies.
“But after you do some studies, you realise that those footages are all the same.
“It is about shocking; it is about violence; it is about crisis.
“Our film is different. It is trying to give refugees a more historical (context), humanity and to relate to daily life: how a woman holds her child, how a child puts on his shoes, how a man is lighting a cigarette.
“All those details relate to everyone. You can understand they are human, even in these conditions that you cannot imagine.”
Journalism, he said, had for a long time been too keen to pursue stories around the most shocking images available. And when it comes to refugees, “it has not talked deeply about who they are and what the reason is for them being where they are”.
Ai’s film takes him on a journey from Lesbos, the Greek island that was at the frontline of Europe’s migration crisis when the film was made last year, to Kenya’s huge Dadaab refugee camp, via the slums of Gaza, the Afghan-Pakistan border area and the battlefields of Iraq, before ending up on the United StatesMexico border that President Donald Trump has promised to turn into “a beautiful wall”.
Ai has addressed the refugee issue in his work before, notably when he wrapped Berlin’s Konzerthaus in thousands of orange life vests recovered from Lesbos, and by using his own body to recreate an image of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose washed-up corpse provided one of the current crisis’s defining images.
“I tried almost desperately to make a shout, to make my voice heard,” Ai said of his previous work.
“But I realised it was not enough for myself to understand the topic.
“It is so broad and has such deep history, such complexity.
“So, I decided to make a film. It is a journey to show how and what I learned, and to have the possibility to show this to other people.”
Ai, who has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, was held under house arrest without charge for three months in 2011, and banned from travelling outside China until 2015. He is now based in Berlin. AFP