Ai Weiwei certainly knows a thing or two about the agony endured by refugees. After his father, the lauded poet Ai Qing, was branded as an enemy by the Chinese government, he and his family were exiled to a labor camp in the Gobi Desert. Much like his artistic disciple, “Hooligan Sparrow” director Nanfu Wang, Ai Weiwei never conceals his presence from the audience in “Human Flow,” shooting on a handheld camera that distinguishes his footage from those captured by his team of 11 cinematographers, including the great Christopher Doyle. Whenever he appears onscreen, he is seen absorbing his surroundings while occasionally conducting interviews, making small talk with his subjects, and at one point, comforting a woman overcome with despair. 

Aside from a couple Michael Moore-esque flourishes, such as when the filmmaker is confronted by suspicious cop near the Mexican border, Ai Weiwei never makes his own story part of the narrative. His goal of placing a human face on such a sprawling crisis is a daunting one that few filmmakers have been able to achieve with lasting resonance. One of the best examples was Martin Stirling’s U.K. advertisement for the Save The Children fund, which brilliantly envisioned what the Syrian crisis would look like from the perspective of a young British girl. Yet rather than juxtapose the stories of a few key refugees from around the globe, Ai Weiwei hops freely from one continent to the next, surveying as many micro-vignettes as possible while supplying statistics that often scroll along the bottom of the screen in the style of a news ticker. He also offers various quotes, many from poets, that comment indirectly on the footage, though the most pointed comes from President Kennedy, who stated that “every American who ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendent of immigrants.” Migration is portrayed here not as a fanciful desire but a human right.

It’s not long before all the diverse cultures start to blur together, as the endless stream of exiles find their fate to be as uncertain as that of Godot. Stripped of international rights, many of these refugees clearly are self-sufficient people forced out of their country by war and famine. We hear a tearful interaction between displaced brothers, their faces shrouded in shadow. We see a shattered man recount the drowning of two family members, who have subsequently materialized in his dreams. We feel the rage of protestors lambasting a deal in which Turkey agreed to take back refugees in exchange for money from the European Union. Though the film has no shortage of talking heads, the majority of scenes work on the senses like pure visual poetry. Nearly every shot could be framed on the wall of Ai Weiwei’s latest exhibition, while various objects—such as a mountain of discarded life jackets—could be placed on the museum floor. 

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