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Stay Puft
11-07-2017, 02:18 AM
HUMAN FLOW
Dir. Ai Weiwei

https://i.imgur.com/ph8DryZ.jpg

IMDb page (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6573444/)

Stay Puft
11-07-2017, 04:51 AM
I have to admit, I expected a lot more geopolitics out of this. Instead, Human Flow sees Ai Weiwei crafting a humanist portrait of the status of refugees generally and worldwide. The result is a powerful documentary that often, and frustratingly, lacks specific and seemingly necessary context.

It's also a massive film, given the amount of time Ai spent travelling the world, the many locations he visited, and presumably the mountain of raw footage he acquired with his various devices. Ai shoots footage with his cellphone, and also has an army of professional camera operators and cinematographers (including Christoper Doyle!) at his disposal. Most notably, he also has an army of drones. These drones allow Ai to craft some compelling and breathtaking images, as they soar across the sky, or float down from the air, offering novel perspectives or taking in large vistas in a sweeping fashion. There are many stylistic elements at play, too, including atmospheric poetry interludes, conventional talking head interviews, dramatic staging (Ai will often appear onscreen and insert himself into a situation) and most peculiarly, a news ticker that sends headlines scrolling across the screen. No surprise, the film can often feel shapeless as a result. For example, you'll have a quote appear onscreen from a Muslim poet, then you'll have footage of refugees being attacked with tear gas, then you'll have footage of Ai Weiwei himself in a (completely different?) refugee camp, smiling as he gets a haircut. The order of events, and their relationship, is sometimes baffling or simply arbitrary. Inevitable, perhaps, when assembling so much raw footage into a two hour documentary. There's also a sequence set on the US/Mexican border which could have easily been cut for time, as it's so brief and insubstantial as to feel disconnected from everything else in the film.

There are a couple topics that the film does take some time to explore. Most notably is the EU-Turkey refugee deal, which is discussed by a couple interview subjects and which Ai clearly criticizes. However, the film will gloss over other topics such as climate change and, particularly frustrating given that the world currently seems content to ignore it, the persecution of the Rohingya. Not that the film's purpose should be strictly educational, or informative, of course. That's clearly not Ai's goal. Ai is interested less in the specific politics of the moment and more in the state of the human soul globally. The film perhaps works best as a visual companion to forming a better understanding of the refugee crisis at large, a varied and far-reaching portrait of what the crisis looks like, the real human faces and stories otherwise lost in the statistical noise. (This makes the appearance of the aforementioned news ticker overlay all the more awkward and distracting, given how little it actually works to inform or contextualize. It's a strange choice, and I think the movie would have been stronger if it had ditched that and stuck with the poetry.) Ai captures plenty of images throughout the film that are shocking and powerful, striking and urgent, and also humorous and absurd. He brings force and immediacy to a topic that may otherwise seem wholly abstract for its intended audience.

To that end, I would say Human Flow is a vital and important document. As a film documentary, I would also say it's good, but not quite great. Recommended, all the same.