Ai Weiwei's Human Flow is a film that spans the latitudes of a mural painting, vast and long, covering one end of the Earth to the other, many times with a top-down view. This documentary about forcibly displaced people around the world -- from Syria and Iraq, from Eritrea to Mexico -- plays out in the broad scope of Refugee 101, and it works as a (very long) campaign presentation of United Nations High Commission of Human Rights (UNHCR).
Running over two hours, it has rapturous images of large throngs of humans in motion, sometimes in suffering, as well as some heart-wrenching episodes. It's also, frankly, boring and matter-of-fact, an exquisite picture book that merely scratches the surface of the world's presently largest wound.
The refugee crisis is a hard subject, to be sure. There's the cataclysmic texture of the problem, the dizzying figures, the geopolitical background, the sheer expanse of territories to cover, the visceral tragedies of those who've fled their homes and the existential dilemma of the would-be asylum nations. And above everything else, the human face of the refugees. Ai, a dissident artist originally from China who now lives in Berlin, sets out to push every button there is to push. Plus one more: this is his film -- the first feature-length film by a well-known international provocateur -- so it has to carry his mark, his face, his take on the issue.
A few shots in, we see Ai, bearded and burly, shooting with a small camera (his crew works a bigger, main camera) as weary refugees beach a Greek shore. After a while we can work out Human Flow's structure of tableaux: each chapter, which takes place in various hotbeds of the crisis, begins with a beautiful drone shot (the ocean, the desert, the tent city, etc), followed by a text from a newspaper headline, then an interview with the refugees, who talk about their plights, then an aid worker (many from UNHCR) appear to give some facts and figures, then we see Ai behind the scene shooting or talking, then the chapter closes with a text from a poem (usually from Middle Eastern poets, including the Adonis from Syria and Mahmoud Darwish from Palestine). Ai repeats that formula for 140 minutes, and while that allows us to take in the stories of those fleeing their homes -- from war, from Islamic State, from economic malaise, from climate change -- it also feels rather long, tedious and uninspired.
The design of the film is to cover the breadth of the problem, not the depth, and so we have aestheticised images of the world's biggest human displacement after World War II, but not much insight, and not much (or none) individual experience that might have engaged us emotionally. There are a few moments that tug at your heart strings (the Gaza part, for instance, or when a woman breaks down during an interview). Besides such ground-level emotion, Human Flow wavers between half-hearted poetics and cold realism. As journalism, it's earnest but not very intelligent, and it doesn't probe any new angles or invite any new discussions. As cinema, it feels almost aloof.
This is not to question Ai's intention -- he has done many art pieces on the subject of refugees, notably his monumental life jacket installation pieces, and his presence in Human Flow is not, as many have feared, patronising. But Human Flow, despite its efforts and comprehensiveness, is at best a sketch, a film that you'll feel compelled to watch because it's about an important subject of the world, a hot discourse that fuels your intellectual conversation, and because it's an Ai Weiwei film. It should be shown in classrooms or refugee conferences, not necessarily in its entirety -- any 30- or 45-minute chunk from the whole thing would be fine.
For other refugee stories, maybe you want to check out Michael Winterbottom's 2002 In This World, or last year's Fire At Sea, a poetic documentary by Gianfranco Rosa, or Steph Ching's and Ellen Martinez's After Spring, which is about Syrian refugees.
