“Human Flow” is an Oscar contender for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Artist, activist and director Ai Weiwei captures the global refugee crisis — the greatest human displacement since World War II — I in this breathtakingly epic film journey “Human Flow”.
Imagine this: When danger comes, you and your family jettison your lives in mid-sentence, leaving behind a bombed-out home and repression at your heels. You pour all your precious savings into a passage of weeks or months — over mountains, across deserts — to jump into a flimsy rubber raft, daring to defy the ocean’s perils, chasing an unwritten future. Or you wait in suspense, journey blocked, at a closed border, in an improvised camp, fighting to never allow the barbed wire to pierce your hope. Perhaps you escape catastrophe, only to deliver yourself to a city you’ve never even imagined, to new streets crackling with fears and furies that make no sense, and even still, you are driven by the most basic human optimism, to live your life no matter what it takes.
These are not fictional situations. These are the real human faces — each lined and luminous with stories of love and courage and the urgent battle for survival — of a planet on the move, a planet in the midst of a human emergency. Much has been said in the past few years by politicians and pundits about the millions of refugees fleeing war, hunger and persecution. Yet, as debates rage about who and how many, security versus responsibility, putting up walls or building bridges, the vital truth of real people with real dreams and real needs caught in a labyrinth of uncertainty can get lost. The very word “refugee” can distance, can lull us into forgetting this major story of our times is not about statistics or abstract masses but about beating hearts, about lives-in-process, a stream of individual stories full of color, ecstasies and sorrows no different from our own.
That’s why artist Ai Weiwei foregrounds the humanity of refugees — their quest for the things we all want: safety, shelter, peace, the opportunity to be who you are — in his powerful new work of cinema: “Human Flow”. Ai, at once celebrated, persecuted and famed for an outlaw spirit that speaks directly to a world of inequality and injustice, here pushes back against the worldwide tide of fear with a defiant act of gentleness. His whole career has been about resisting borders of all kinds, about unifying art and activism. And now, with “Human Flow”, he again stretches art’s definition to include trying to change the social fabric to which his work responds.
“The rare movie that deserves to be called ‘stunning’.” — Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice
“A testament to the power of seeing. A vivid look at a human crisis that’s changing the face of our planet.” — Jo Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal
“Four stars! Impossible to ignore.” — Dave Calhoun, Time Out New York
“Bracing, often strangely beautiful. What Mr. Ai seeks is to go far beyond the nightly news; he wants to give you a sense of the scale of the crisis, its terrifying, world-swallowing immensity.” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times