Human. Flow. The central issue with Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei‘s meticulously well-intentioned, undeniably colossal and beautifully shot documentary, which debuted in Venice and now embodies the refugee-focus of the competition line-up at the Antalya Film Festival in Turkey, exists right there in its title. The words summon the image of a swell of collective humanity engaged in a gracefully epic, natural process, like the flocking of birds in the sky, or the glimmering progress of a school of fish through darkened waters on their yearly pilgrimage to a far-off spawning ground. The global sweep of this continents-spanning two-year project bears that impression out: as drone cameras fly over columns of people toiling through scrublands toward camps that stretch over the horizon and still remain inadequate, it’s easy to imagine it all as a schematic of ocean tides and currents mapped onto throngs of people, circulating from shore to shore in ceaseless flux. However, if we’re sticking with watery metaphors, this ongoing, escalating humanitarian catastrophe is not a flow. It’s a dam burst of disaster, a global flash flood, a tsunami of devastating destructive power that has caused the deaths of untold thousands and forcibly, violently displaced millions. And it is the result of, or at least immensely exacerbated by, a plethora of man-made causes: war, terrorism, famine, poverty. It is macroeconomics and geopolitics. It is urgent, and it is not natural.
Yet, Ai’s meditative approach largely foregoes punch for reach, showing the genial artist, a famous “brand” unto himself due to years at the pinnacle of his profession and a fondness for impishly self-promotional selfies, visiting all corners of the globe and interacting with, or more often simply observing, the victims of various migrant crises round the world. These encounters, often with minimal dialogue due to language barriers, interspersed with talking head experts and aid workers relating some hard statistical and logistical truths, do establish the commonality of migrant experience from Kenya to Palestine to France to Syria to Mexico to Greece to Jordan to Bangladesh to Germany and beyond.
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Is that truly what is needed? More evidence of the dauntingly immense scale of the problem, and more reason to see refugees not as individuals but as an unfortunate yet undifferentiated population whose (overwhelmingly non-white) faces the camera might linger on a second before moving on to the next and the next and the next? Make no mistake: there are graphic, shocking moments here, in particular a scene outside Mosul that is viscerally upsetting. There are scenes of gentle humor and human connection too. But for the most part, we never remain long enough with any one person to get more than a cursory idea of their story. Over the course of the film’s 140 minute runtime, we end up with a sense of the crisis as a tragedy, yes, but a choral, abstract one.
For such a distinctive, confrontational and courageous artist, formally the film is disappointingly timid too, amounting to more of a celebrity travelogue than an exploratory documentary, let alone an art piece. Couched in fluid photography from a phalanx of cinematographers including the legendary Christopher Doyle, it largely succeeds in the dubious aim of snatching frames of beauty and vibrancy from all this squalor and misery. Along with those gliding God-like drone shots, that beautifying impulse puts the ugliness and urgency of the crisis at an aesthetic and narrative remove. We come to it from a distance, and like the song says, from a distance war can look like peace, and no one is in need. And that is a pernicious inference considering the biggest obstacle to finding a solution to this emergency might just be first world complacency, which in turn can be swayed into mistrust and fanned into hatred by the lazy xenophobic rhetoric of demagogues.
At the first “Human Flow” screening here in Antalya, a technical issue stopped the projection halfway. A man got up and complained in angry Turkish about the lack of representation of his country in the film. His complaint was premature, as there is some detail on Turkey, especially with regards to displaced people from its war-torn neighbor, Syria. But on another level he was perhaps justified, and unconsciously responding the fatal flaw of ‘Flow’: when you talk about the crisis everywhere, it’s hard to relate directly to the crisis anywhere. This is further complicated by the fast-changing nature of this intensely topical issue: the Rohingya people of Bangladesh are mentioned but more recent revelations about the genocide being perpetrated against that minority in Myanmar, are obviously absent. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers, though it reminds us that the “flow” this film documents is a fast-rushing torrent, and this long, labor-intensive, 23-country odyssey is at best a snapshot of it as it was for a brief instant in the recent past.
It remains very possible that future generations will regard Ai as the foremost artist of the refugee crisis. But it will be for his attention-garnering, provocative stunts and installations — filling a pond in Vienna with lifejackets; wrapping a German concert hall in bright orange inflatables; covering sculptures with foil emergency blankets; or the recently unveiled NY-based series of structures titled “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.” “Human Flow” is the wallpaper version of that larger project — an oddly placid background hum that can perhaps best serve as a thorough primer for anyone who has managed to remain completely unaware of, or unmoved by, the defining global issue of our time.
In another of his artworks, Ai recreated that infamous, heartbreaking photo of the little boy lying dead in the sand. The original is a galvanizingly devastating single image that speaks more eloquently than all 140 minutes of Ai’s epic, precisely because it is not a portrait of millions, just one, and it reminds us savagely that refugees are not indistinguishable particles that together make up a rising, flowing tide, but whole rivers and oceans unto themselves, every single one of them. [C+]