Human Flow

Ai Weiwei's first feature film documents the more than sixty five million people displaced by war, famine and climate change, the largest such movement since the Second World War. The scale of the production is as striking as the film itself: twenty three countries, forty refugee camps, over nine hundred hours of footage, six hundred interviews, a crew of two hundred and twelve cinematographers, among them Christopher Doyle, Wong Kar-wai's longtime collaborator. Drones and professional cameras were used alongside iPhones, the project having begun with footage Ai shot on his own phone on the island of Lesbos. Eleven languages are spoken in it. The director's own history connects directly to the subject: the year he was born, his father, the poet Ai Qing, was exiled to a labor camp, and the family spent twenty years in exile, first near the Russian border and then in Xinjiang, branded counter revolutionaries. Ai has said the real subject of the film is himself, and that any of us could become a refugee. It screened in main competition at Venice, holds ninety one percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the director announced he would donate his profits to refugee organizations. Who it's for: Viewers drawn to large scale, visually ambitious documentary and to the subject of migration. Who it's not for: Not for anyone wanting a focused, argument driven documentary, since critics most often flagged its sprawling, wandering structure.