Human Flow – 7.5

Remarkable for what it was, an artistic portrait of refugee populations around the globe. Among the things it didn’t try to do: identify the causes of the refugee crisis, suggest solutions, blame anyone, show squalor or desperation, or make the audience feel guilty or bad. Like a good artwork, the film presents itself and lets the viewer bring her own thoughts, ideas and preconceptions to the experience. For example, although I doubt this was director Ai Weiwei’s intention, I thought immediately of how American foreign policy has caused or exacerbated almost every one of the refugee situations depicted – the Rohingya of Myanmar being perhaps the only exception. Everyone that Ai interviewed was articulate, fully clothed and seemingly healthy, and Ai’s casual appearance at each location was both lighthearted and a connective thread that brought the movie down to earth. Above all, the physical beauty of the cinematography and the geographic settings softened a story that otherwise might have been hard to sit through for two hours, twenty minutes.