Human Flow *** ½ / *****
Directed by: Ai Weiwei.
Written by: Chin-Chin Yap &Tim Finch & Boris Cheshirkov.
Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow is a globetrotting documentary that goes from one war ravished place to another documenting the flow of refugees as they flee violence, persecution and natural disasters looking to find a better life elsewhere – and how, everywhere they go, they find more and more barriers to their travels. Ai Weiwei has, for a long time, been one of China’s most famous and outspoken artists and human rights activists – he has gotten himself in trouble many times, but he’s going to keep on doing what he does – which is, sometimes quite literally, giving the middle finger to the powers that be. Human Flow is done in the same spirit, although the tone is a touch more civil than I thought it may be coming from Ai Weiwei.
In the film, Ai goes from place to place interviewing the people who lives have been turned upside down by the crisis – and are no running for their lives, alongside their family. He treats everyone he meets with the upmost respect, and while he does get details of their stories, he doesn’t linger on them. He also talks to experts on the crisis, and just how bad it has gotten – and has a host of statistics, news stories and quotes littered throughout the movie – some going across the bottom of the screen like a news ticker. He doesn’t spend much time at all with those who are against the refugees – those who have built, or want to build, walls and fences to keep them out. The film alternates between two types of scenes and imagery – much of the on the ground footage seems to have been shot by Ai himself with hand held cameras or an iPhone for example, in which he captures the individual stories. There are also a lot of overhead shots – presumably from drones – which capture the whole wide scope of the migrations that are going on. The reasoning is clear – he is trying to capture both the epic and the intimate about this crisis, putting any number of human faces on the crisis, but not wanting the forest to get lost because of the trees.
This approach has its positives and its negatives. On one hand the decision to pretty much go everywhere on the planet where people are being displaced makes the sheer, epic scale of the crisis felt – it’s not one or two issues that we can solve, and make it go away, it doesn’t really allow for any in depth reporting on any of it. This is, I think, by design – as Ai is basically showing us people from all backgrounds, faiths, ethnicities, etc. being displaced – which should make it clear that it isn’t a simple, easy fix. At the same time though, it does make the whole thing seem so large that there is no way to solve it all, and as the numbers scroll across the screen, you may well be floored. Still, I can imagine someone like Donald Trump or his supporters (Trump is never named in the film, but it’s still what Ai feels about him) thinking that the crisis is too large from them to handle, and perhaps closing the border is the only way to go. After all, how could America deal with an influx of people this large?
What Ai is going for in Human Flow though should provide at least part of that answer – he is appealing to our shared humanity, and counting on the goodness of people to find a way solve the problem. It isn’t going to go away – and no wall can prevent it. So, what are we going to do?
