Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Special Features: Filmmaker Commentary, Deleted Scenes, Interviews, Trailer

Poor China. So isolated, so misunderstood. And why is the rest of the world always picking on it over the business of stifling personal expression and trampling human rights? Using sarcasm as a diplomatic strategy may not work very well, but in the intimately revealing documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, it is doled out in equal measure with irony and outrage as a way of conveying the danger and absurdity of some of the country's more egregiously oppressive policies. The artist and activist Ai Weiwei has been captured in unique profile by the American freelance journalist Alison Klayman, who had unfettered access to this near-heroic figure as he traveled around China and the world to promote his exhibitions and his fight for a variety of human causes, which were often one and the same. Until the government shut him up, that is, in an incident that made world headlines and that Klayman revealed as best she could after his 81 days of detention and an official gag that left his powerful voice and deliberate actions all but paralyzed. Though not exactly rambling, the documentary is certainly freewheeling as it flits around Ai's life and career, from his decade-plus tenure as downtown New York experimentalist, to his iconic life masterminding projects and installations like the 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds that filled London's Tate Modern, to the wrapping of the Haus der Kunst in Munich with thousands of children's backpacks, to his part in designing the Birds' Nest Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics (which he later renounced loudly). The film also takes us through his process of accounting for the thousands of children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake whose deaths were covered up by the Chinese government. A prime example of his compression of conceptual art and political activism is the huge wall of these forgotten children's names adorning a wall in his studio, and his subsequent effort to enlist individuals from around the world to speak and record each name as an Internet monument to their loss. Indeed it is Ai's exploitation of Twitter (after the government shut down his blog) that brought global awareness to all manner of abuses in China, not to mention his significant stature as an iconoclast. His most extensive pet Twitter project was recounting his own beating at the hands of police and his persistent effort at pursuing a catch-22 of legal maneuvers against the authorities. He documented and Tweeted encounters with policemen, lawyers, and technocrats every step of the way as a piece of concept art that's about as personal and affecting as any art can be. Even his personal life is presented as something resembling performance art, such as the offhanded way he interacts with his mother, his devoted wife, his mistress, and his adorable illegitimate child. There's more to the story of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, but it will have to be told after his government-installed muzzle is removed. If that ever happens, Twitter will be the first place to hear about it, and from Ai Weiwei himself. --Ted Fry