'Humanity Is Subjective'
A conversation with Ai Weiwei about perpetual migration, the tragedy of exile, and the power of plain cinematic language.
“Being a refugee … is the most pervasive kind of cruelty that can be exercised against a human being.” So says an interviewee in the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei’s new documentary, Human Flow, bringing to life the stakes of a crisis that has displaced more than 65 million people worldwide.
A displaced person himself who is living in exile in Berlin, Ai involves viewersin these stakes, implicating them by virtue ofcollective passivity. He also suggests that the crisis is by no means a contemporary phenomenon, and that it is endemic to the human condition: As if by osmosis, often forced by war and persecution, people have fled their homes and sought refuge across the
