Rising tide
HUMAN FLOW, documentary, rated PG-13, The Screen, 3.5 chiles
Chinese dissident artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei’s lengthy, compelling documentary is a timely, urgent, artfully done film on the international migrant refugee crisis. It’s a glimpse into a situation that grows worse by the day. The crisis, we learn in the movie, has reached epidemic proportions, with an estimated 65 million migrants who are currently fleeing their homelands to escape starvation, environmental disasters linked to climate change, and wars. But Ai’s film is not merely an unsettling record of the problem. It’s a look at the faces that make up the flowing river of bodies that encircles the world. And at times it’s wide, also like a river, looking down on its subjects from vast heights, tracing their inexorable treks across desert sands, mountainous terrain, and vast oceans on their quest to find someplace to call home.
The film opens with an almost bucolic twilight scene that pans from a darkening sky to crowds of people, packed shoulder-to-shoulder into boats arriving on shores that are unfamiliar to the immigrants. As the camera nears, we hear their cries and shouts as an almost peaceful vision of beauty reveals within it a desperate human drama. Much of the film is like this, slowly drawing us into experiences that have become universal, though some of these stories are told through individuals’ eyes.
Ai shows us Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority, forced from their homes to flee to Bangladesh, along with recent arrivals from foreign countries living in host nations such as Germany, Greece, and the United States. There, they eke out meager existences while facing rising antiimmigrant sentiments. They are corralled behind barbed-wire fences in makeshift tents or face devastation wrought by genocide or drought — and all of it is mixed up with hard questions, but few answers, on how to effectively deal with these problems. In Italy, for instance, the consistent influx of migrant workers from Africa has caused hardships for local populations who are unable to find work. The rising number of migrants is, according to the film, at its largest point globally since World War II.
Human Flow is an ambitious film, made with a crew of hundreds working in 23 countries worldwide, including Afghanistan, France, Israel, Kenya, and Mexico. The sheer numbers and constant movement of people are an argument, in itself, against the futility of border walls and fences in an increasingly shrinking global community and growing overall world population. Ai ambles — not aimlessly, but out of necessity — from one corner of the world to another, telling a story that can’t be told in any straightforward way but only through visual impressions, some of the most beautiful and compelling of which are the drone shots peering down at the dotted forms of men, women, and children. If he told the story purely from that vantage point, way up in the sky, we might not see them as people at all. — Michael Abatemarco