‘Human Flow’ Looks Straight at Global Refugee Crisis Without Blinking Michael O’Sullivan - The Washington Post
go to original October 20, 2017

Human Flow Official Trailer (Amazon Studios)

The Chinese contemporary visual artist Ai Weiwei — whose portraits of political dissidents, formed from Lego blocks, are currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. — has never limited himself to a single medium. Over his career, the 60-year-old has produced powerful sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, even a stream of social-media postings that can be read as both a form of performance art and as political statement.

Ai’s heartbreaking new documentary “Human Flow,” on the subject of the global refugee crisis, continues a tradition of making work that is pungent 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 film largely avoids the tropes of standard documentaries, using on-screen facts and figures only sparingly or in the margins, 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 which of the 40 refugee encampments Ai visited we are looking at — Greece? Kenya? Italy? The West Bank? — or who is on-screen, that’s part of his point.

In place of talking-head interviews that might lend clarity, Ai’s signature shot seems to be the overhead drone sequence, offering breathtaking bird’s-eye views of, say, a refugee-packed boat on the open sea or an expanse of cubicle-like shelters inside a massive airplane hangar. Aestheticizing the tragic does not undercut it, but reinforces it.

Read the rest at FayObserver.com

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