Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly (2019)

Directed by

Cheryl Haines

Genre

documentary film, biographical film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 16m

Rating

8.8 of 10 from 2 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This documentary follows artist Ai Weiwei as he creates an art exhibition at Alcatraz prison. It shows how he worked remotely because the Chinese government would not let him travel. The film includes interviews with Ai Weiwei and his mother about their family's past exile and looks at human rights issues around the world.

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What happens

Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly is a 2019 American documentary film about the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, and his art exhibition at Alcatraz, a former prison on an island near San Francisco, California, USA. The documentary covers the creation of the exhibition @Large:Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, a 2014 project that was shown at Alcatraz, with multiple exhibits, including Trace, which featured political prisoners around the world as lego portraits. At this time, Ai Weiwei still had his passport withheld by the Chinese government, so foreign travel was not possible for him and he had to create the exhibition remotely. The exhibition came about through contact with the San Francisco curator and gallerist Cheryl Haines. The film considers human rights. Interviews with Ai Weiwei and his mother demonstrate the psychological effect of the family's exile in the 1950s to a labor camp in northeast China. The exhibition had two main parts. "Trace" was a room with portraits on the floor of 176 people that had imprisoned for their beliefs, created in bright colors using Lego bricks. The second room, "Yours Truly", enabled visitors to write postcards to some of the imprisoned people, which were later sent by mail to the prisoners where this was possible. The film includes interviews with Chelsea Manning, a former United States Army intelligence analyst who leaked military and diplomatic documents in 2010, originally sentenced to 35 years imprisonment by the US government, and John Kiriakou, a former US CIA agent who revealed the CIA's use of torture, especially waterboarding, and imprisoned by the US government during 2013–15 at the time of the exhibition. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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