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Disturbing the Peace


            Human rights become profoundly personal when dissident artist Ai Weiwei's monumental exhibition on Alcatraz inspires thousands of visitors to connect with prisoners of conscience worldwide.Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly expands on the unprecedented exhibition @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, organized in 2014 by the film's director Cheryl Haines. Following Ai Weiwei's detention by Chinese authorities and while still under house arrest in Beijing, the outspoken artist and activist remotely transformed Alcatraz, a former island penitentiary and current national park, into a remarkable expression of socially engaged art. The multi-part work culminated in an expansive display of larger than life-size Lego portraits of prisoners of conscience from around the world, seen by over 900,000 visitors. Throughout the film, we discover how personal these issues are for Ai Weiwei and the extent to which he wove his family's experiences into the exhibition. In the late 1950s, his father, a nationally revered poet, was imprisoned in a remote work camp. Ai, his mother and brother recall years of privation on the edge of the Gobi Desert - and the profoundly moving impact of an unexpected postcard expressing support. The final artwork at Alcatraz, Yours Truly, consisted of postcards beautifully illustrated with the national birds and flowers of the prisoners' countries. Visitors were invited to write messages of hope to the imprisoned activists featured in the Lego portraits. By the time the exhibition ended, over 90,000 postcards had been sent. Then something even more astonishing happened: prisoners and their families began writing back.Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly follows these postcards around the globe-from Alcatraz Island to Beijing, Washington, D.C., and Cairo-as former prisoners of conscience and the families of those still detained describe their impossible choices and the comfort they found and still find in messages from people they would never meet. By the film's end, Ai himself is finally free, seeing his own exhibit in public for the first time. He meets with former prisoner Chelsea Manning, while others who have been released, such as Egypt's Arab Spring activist Ahmed Maher, express wonder at the connections Ai has initiated and the many strangers who sent encouraging messages. Ultimately, Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly is a call to action, extending the incredible reach of Ai Weiwei's art by asking viewers to take the issue of global human rights to heart and make a simple gesture that would profoundly touch those unjustly imprisoned worlds away.
    

Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Fairytale

Human Flow

Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema

Ai Weiwei's Turandot

Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case


            "Coronation" (2020) is a documentary film about the lockdown in Wuhan, China, during the Covid-19 outbreak in the spring of 2020.
On December 1, 2019, the first patient with Covid-19 symptoms was identified in Wuhan. Chinese officials repeatedly denied that human-to-human transmission was possible, concealed the number of diagnosed patients, and punished medical staff for disclosing information about the epidemic. On January 23, 2020, Wuhan was placed under a city-wide lockdown. Covid-19 has become a global pandemic, with over 22 million people infected and over 780,000 deaths.
"Coronation" examines the political specter of Chinese state control from the first to the last day of the Wuhan lockdown. The film records the state's brutally efficient, militarized response to control the virus. Sprawling emergency field hospitals were erected in a matter of days, 40,000 medical workers were bused in from all over China, and the city's residents were sealed into their homes.
The film takes us into the heart of these temporary hospitals and ICU wards, showing the entire process of diagnosis and treatment. Patients and their families are interviewed, reflecting their thinking about the pandemic and expressing anger and confusion over the state's callous restriction of their liberties. The film also takes us into the private lives of individuals living under the lockdown: a couple attempt to return to their home in Wuhan, a courier delivers essentials to res- idents barred from leaving their community, an emergency construction worker stuck in limbo is forced to live out of his car1, a former party cadre and her son debate the function of the media and the party's response to the outbreak, a grieving son navigates the bureaucracy of retrieving his father's ashes.
China has assumed the status of superpower on the global stage, yet it remains poorly understood by other nations. Through the lens of the pandemic, "Coronation" clearly depicts the Chinese crisis management and social control machine-through surveillance, ideological brainwashing, and brute determination to control every aspect of society. The film shows the changes that took place in a city and in individual space under the impact of the virus; it illustrates the value of individual life in the political environment, reflecting on the difficulties we face as individuals and countries in the context of globalization. Ultimately, the result is a society lacking trust, transparency, and respect for humanity. Despite the impressive scale and speed of the Wuhan lockdown, we face a more existential question: can civilization survive without humanity? Can nations rely on one another without transparency or trust?
Ai Weiwei remotely directed and produced the film from Europe. The filming was done by ordinary citizens living in Wuhan.
    

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