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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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
In February 2019, the Hong Kong government proposed a bill that would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects from Hong Kong to face trial in mainland China. The controversial bill sparked immediate outrage over widespread fear of arbitrary detention and politically motivated trials that would decimate Hong Kong’s autonomy under ‘one country, two systems.’ Protests escalated into epic pro-democracy demonstrations, in part led by young people connected via social media. COCKROACH, filmed during the height of the protests, captures the extraordinary intensity of an unprecedented era in Hong Kong’s history.
The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority from Myanmar's Rakhine State who have suffered several decades of persecution by the Burmese government. Many fled to neighbouring Bangladesh and other countries in search of safety. Following widespread ethnic cleansing by the Burmese army in August 2017, a mass exodus of over 700,000 Rohingya took place from Myanmar to Cox's Bazar, where one million refugees now live. Filmed over several months in Cox's Bazar, Rohingya is an observational, poetic record of the community's everyday life, social rituals, and the camp's unique landscapes.
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.
Europe's refugees are met at eye level in a film by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who defends the ideals of humanism in the midst of the crisis.