Ai Weiwei’s film approximately the world migration crisis moves from the universal to the personal to make an emphatic pointBroad in scope,huge in ambition but a little overbearing in execution, this documentary by the artist Ai Weiwei is a direct extension of the themes present throughout his work. Human Flow is an interrogation of the world’s response to its unprecedented migrant crisis. It looks at mass movement from Syria, or Iraq and parts of Africa to Europe; of the Rohingya people from Myanmar to Bangladesh; from Palestine to Jordan,among others.
The title is spellbinding – “flow” suggests something inanimate but inexorable. It invokes the alarmist language of some media coverage – the “floods” and the “tides”. And at first the sheer scale of movement is such that it’s hard to see the human account. But then, through brief but intimate exchanges, and Ai brings the individuals behind the statistics into focus.
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Source: guardian.co.uk