‘Human Flow’ a gripping look at global refugee crisis
Ai Weiwei’s documentary gazes compassionately at the plight of migrants
The Chinese visual artist Ai Weiwei, 60, has never limited himself to a single medium. He has produced powerful sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, even a stream of social-media posts that can be read as both a form of performance art and a political statement.
Ai’s heartbreaking new documentary “Human Flow,” about the global refugee crisis, continues his tradition of making work that is pungent both conceptually and aesthetically. Shot in 23 countries and culled from 900 hours of footage of refugees from the Middle East, Africa, Mexico and other places, the filmlargely uses onscreen facts and figures only spar- ingly, and narration not at all.
“News crawls,” featuring headlines from PBS, The New York Times and other journalism outlets, regularly creep across the screen, adding minimal context, and contrasting sharply with fragments of poetry. If at times it is not immediately clear who and which of the 40 refugee encampments visited by Ai are on the screen — Greece? Kenya? Italy? the West Bank?— that’s part of his point.
In place of using talking-heads
interviews for clarity, Ai’s signature shot seems to be the overhead drone sequence, which gives a breathtaking bird’s-eye view of, say, a refugee-packed boat on the open sea or an expanse of cubicle-like shelters inside a massive airplane hangar. Perhaps counterintuitively, an aesthetic approach to the tragic does not undercut it, but reinforces it.
In other scenes, Ai simply turns his unblinking camera on an individual — who may or may not speak — forcing the audience to confront, for an uncomfortably long period, the common humanity we share with those who are, all too often, rendered as statistics.
At nearly 2 ½ hours, the film is long, and it sags here and there. But the cumulative effect is not exhaustion or boredom, but rather sorrow and outrage at the violence, economic despair and persecution — whether religious, ethnic or political — that have driven these people from their homes.
At a couple of points, Ai turns his gaze from the flow of humanity to focus on an animal. One wordless sequence features a cow limping unsteadily down an unidentified street. Another segment details the herculean effort and expense undertaken, in 2016, to relocate a single tiger from a zoo in Gaza to the wild in South Africa. At these times, by deliberately playing on our sympathy for nonhuman suffering, “Human Flow” asks us implicitly why we seem to care so much about certain living creatures and not others.