More than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war, the greatest displacement since World War II. Filmmaker Ai Weiwei examines the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Over the course of one year in 23 countries, Weiwei follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretch across the globe, including Afghanistan, France, Greece, Germany and Iraq.
On May 12, 2008, Sichuan province suffered a devastating earthquake with thousands of deaths and many more injured and displaced. School buildings constructed from substandard materials, by corrupt government officials and contractors, collapsed, causing thousands of children to lose their lives. The buildings were described as tofu-dregs buildings because of the ease in which they structurally collapsed. Ai Weiwei and a team of volunteers traveled extensively throughout the areas of devastation, researching and documenting all the student deaths. In the aftermath of the quake, the collapsed school buildings were cleared out, the twisted steel rebar pulled out and sent to scrapyards. Ai acquired many tons of the twisted rebar, sending the material to his studio in Beijing where craftsmen meticulously straightened each piece of rebar.
As the first city hit in the global pandemic, Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, was placed under an unprecedented lockdown. The film showcases the incredible speed and power of China’s state machinery in its fight against the virus. On the other side of the scale is the crushing bureaucracy of that same machine.
Beijing 2003 is a video about the city that the artist lives in, and its people. Participants include assistants Liang Ye and Yang Zhichao, and driver Wu. The piece took 16 days to complete, starting on October 18, 2003. Beginning below the Dabeiyao highway interchange, the vehicle from which the video is shot travels every street within the 'fourth ring' of Beijing, one by one. Approximately 2,400 kilometers and 150 hours of footage later, it ends where it began: below the Dabeiyao highway interchange. Through the windshield, the camera objectively investigates all visual information that appears before the vehicle - the spatial state of the city's streets, the endlessly changing times, scenery, movements, behavior and other aspects - thoroughly, meticulously, and calmly recording the megacity of Beijing through a single lens. The sum of the entire process becomes the meaning of the work.
Fairytale chronicles the making of an installation-cum-performance of the same name. In 2007, Ai Weiwei invited 1001 Chinese citizens of varying ages and backgrounds to travel to Kassel, Germany, for one week each, all expenses paid. This film describes the many challenges facing the artist and his volunteers in coordinating the work.
"Disturbing the Peace" is a documentary of an incident during Tan Zuoren's trial on August 12, 2009. Tan Zuoren was charged with inciting subversion of state power. Chengdu police detained witnessed during the trial of the civil rights advocate, which is an obstruction of justice and violence. Tan Zuoren was charged as a result of his research and questioning regarding the 5.12 Wenchuan students' casualties and the corruption resulting poor building construction. Tan Zuoren was sentenced five years to prison.
Ping’an yueqing investigates the 2010 death of Qian Yunhui, a village leader from Yueqing in the eastern province of Zhejiang, who died under suspicious circumstances that authorities deemed a road accident. The film recounts Qian’s death in which he was crushed by the wheels of a truck.
Beijing: The Third Ring is a document of the two opposite views of traffic flow on 55 bridges along Beijing’s Third Ring. The entire piece is made up of 110 segments.
Beijing: The Second Ring is a document of the two opposite views of traffic flow on 33 bridges along Beijing’s Second Ring. The entire piece is made up of 66 segments.
"Ordos 100" provides a picture of an Ai Weiwei at the pinnacle of his artistic fame, but not yet in the political hot water that was to give him a different kind of notoriety. The film centers on a grand architecture project in Ordos, to be designed by Ai Weiwei.
In June 2008, Yang Jia carried a knife, a hammer, a gas mask, pepper spray, gloves and Molotov cocktails to the Zhabei Public Security Branch Bureau and killed six police officers, injuring another police officer and a guard. He was arrested on the scene, and was subsequently charged with intentional homicide. In the following six months, while Yang Jia was detained and trials were held, his mother mysteriously disappeared. "One Recluse" is a documentary that traces the reasons and motivations behind the tragedy and investigates a trial process filled with shady cover-ups and questionable decisions. The film provides a glimpse into the realities of a government-controlled judicial system and its impact on the citizens’ lives.
Ai Weiwei’s Appeal ¥15,220,910.50 opens with Ai Weiwei’s mother at the Venice Biennial in the summer of 2013 examining Ai’s large S.A.C.R.E.D. installation portraying his 81 day imprisonment. The documentary goes onto chronologically reconstruct the events that occurred from the time he was arrested at the Beijing airport in April 2011 to his final court appeal in September 2012. The film portrays the day-to-day activity surrounding Ai Weiwei, his family and his associates ranging from consistent visits by the authorities, interviews with reporters, support and donations from fans, and court dates. The Film premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on January 23, 2014.
The Bazhou police wrongfully arrested seven people without any evidence around September 16, 2001, for their involvement in the murders of two families. The police have long been suspected of abusing their authority, using “Third Degree” techniques and fabricating false evidence, among other illegal acts. In the years since their arrests, the wrongfully convicted have been put on death sentence, death sentence with reprieve, and life imprisonment.
As a sequel to Ai Weiwei’s film "Disturbing the Peace," the film "So Sorry" (named after the artist’s 2009 exhibition in Munich, Germany) shows the beginnings of the tension between Ai Weiwei and the Chinese Government. In "So Sorry," you see the investigation led by Ai Weiwei studio to identify the students who died during the Sichuan earthquake as a result of corruption and poor building constructions leading to the confrontation between Ai Weiwei and the Chengdu police. After being beaten by the police, Ai Weiwei traveled to Munich, Germany to prepare his exhibition at the museum, Haus der Kunst. The result of his beating led to intense headaches caused by a brain hemorrhage and was treated by emergency surgery. These events mark the beginning of Ai Weiwei’s struggle and surveillance at the hands of the state police.
The documentary depicts a complete picture of a chain in the cat-trading industry. Since the end of 2009 when the government began soliciting expert opinion for the Animal Protection Act, the focus of public debate has always been on whether one should be eating cats or not, or whether cat-eating is a Chinese tradition or not, there are even people who would go as far as to say that the call to stop eating cat meat is "imposing the will of the minority on the majority". Yet the "majority" does not understand the complete truth of cat-meat trading chains: cat theft, cat trafficking, killing cats, selling cats, and eating cats.
A short documentary about the making of "Straight" and "Forge" (2008-2012).
The Shanghai authorities rejected Feng Zhenghu, originated from Wenzhou, Jiejiang, China, from returning to the country for a total of eight times in 2009. On November 4, 2009, Feng Zhenghu attempted to return home for the ninth time but the police from Shanghai used violence and kidnapped him to board a flight to Japan. Feng refused to enter Japan and decided to live in the Immigration Hall at Terminal 1 of the Narita Airport in Tokyo, as an act of protest.
Shot in one-minute increments, Ai's video obsessively documents daily life along Chang'an Boulevard, a thriving road that bisects the capital city along its east-west axis. ("Chang'an" literally means "long peace.") Ai and his team of videographers stopped at 50-meter intervals to record each fixed shot. The result is an impassive yet revelatory videologue that charts the blood flow of Beijing through its supermodern heart to its impoverished extremities.
In 2003, the infectious disease SARS quickly spread across China, causing widespread panic. At the peak of the hysteria accompanying the mysterious epidemic, Ai Weiwei and his brother Ai Dan made a short film together, Ai Weiwei’s first. The film depicts the defiantly carefree attitude of their bohemian group of friends against the ominous backdrop of the SARS outbreak.
A Beijing taxi driver's special understanding of the Party's entreaty "We will not follow the old and rigid path" during the 18th Party Congress.
