“There are any number of unforgettable images in Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, the most necessary and comprehensive documentary to date about our planet’s current refugee crisis,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “but the most indelible of them all is borrowed from a movie about a very different humanitarian failure. For 1956’s Night and Fog, Alain Resnais ventured into the haunted ruins of concentration camps Auschwitz and Majdanek, training his camera on the evidence that had been left behind. A still ocean of women’s hair. A mountain of empty shoes, spilling through the rooms of a building like a flood. . . . In Human Flow, the film’s famous artist-director shoots a massive heap of abandoned lifejackets from above, the camera lifting into the sky to reveal hundreds (or thousands) of the vests piled on top of each other like an endless orange sea. It’s the kind of moment that epitomizes why this is one of the few documentaries to use drone cinematography in a way that doesn’t smack of vanity.”
“Ai Weiwei ventures to over 20 countries, traveling across the globe to places as far afield as Thailand, the United States, Mexico, Lebanon, Malaysia and Kenya,” writes Kaleem Aftab at Cineuropa. The artist “chooses to overwhelm the viewer through the sheer number of camps and streets in the world housing refugees. As he travels from country to country, and from camp to camp, it's the breadth and scope of the crisis that is devastating.”
“That patchwork construction can make it hard to determine exactly which particular crisis you’re in at any given moment—the colors of land, skin and sky are often all you have to go on—though Ai would no doubt argue the lack of delineation is part of his wider point,” suggests the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin. “But a greater story does gradually cohere, one that imbues the crisis with a fresh weight and significance, even as the film’s stately drone shots of teeming camps and displaced peoples snaking their way across unfamiliar landscapes finds a visual beauty in their resilience.”
“Human Flow is basically Refugees for Dummies,” argues Jay Weissberg in Variety. “Yes, Ai stands #withrefugees, which is an admirable Twitter keyword yet by making this a self-described ‘personal journey,’ he distracts from the real issues and turns the documentary into just another famous person’s endorsement of the latest humanitarian bandwagon.”
“While the film makes a direct plea to the EU to stay true to its charter on refugees (and gets very specific about deals with Turkey), Ai’s on-screen presence, talking and taking photographs, perhaps for one of his site-specific installation pieces, is more of a gentle face and a hug than a jeremiad,” writes Jordan Hoffman for the Guardian. “Policy-minded viewers may bristle at Ai’s approach. ‘All refugees in crisis should be treated equally, but perhaps all crises that create refuges should not,’ is an argument that is easier to make when viewing from 30,000 feet.”
Screen’s Lee Marshall finds Human Flow to be “a surprisingly ‘regular’ film from an artist known for his defiant run-ins with Chinese authorities and his audacious contemporary art installations (including a spate of recent refugee-themed works). Cadenced by interviews with experts and aid officials, peppered with fact-filled captions (some running in news-feed mode along the bottom of the screen), Human Flow is at heart an immersive world tour . . . In its structure and argument, it is not an arc so much as a mosaic—something that may test viewers looking for a single take on a crisis which, we are informed, has reached Second World War proportions, with around 65 million currently displaced.”
In the Hollywood Reporter, Deborah Young argues that “this is an ambitious cinematic leap forward for Ai Weiwei, who has previously shot videos and installations on urban infrastructures and who has addressed social themes like world migration in his artwork, always in striking and original ways that force the viewer to see the obvious through new eyes. Here there is more sweep, less insight.”
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At CineVue, John Bleasdale notes that Human Flow is a “timely film, as the debate has shifted with the surge in movement from one of occasional sympathy—spurred by images like that of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned child on the Turkish beach—to a callusing of sensibility which has its political expression in the rise of the far-right and its physical expression in the rise of the border walls and fences. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, only eleven countries had such physical barriers marking their borders. Now that number is seventy.”
“I became involved with the subject of refugees because I am conscious of how these people have been mistreated, neglected and displaced,” Ai tells Variety’s Nick Vivarelli. “I know what it is like to be viewed as an outcast. The current-day displacement of people is the largest since the end of World War II. It’s a global issue and one which tests the resolve of developed nations to uphold human rights. I am eager to understand how those values—which form the foundation of democracy and freedom—are protected and how they have been violated.”
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