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...
"Disturbing the Peace" is a documentary of an incident during Tan Zuoren's trial on August 12, 2009. Tan Zuoren was charged with inciting subversion of state power. Chengdu police detained witnessed during the trial of the civil rights advocate, which is an obstruction of justice and violence. Tan...
In 2003, the infectious disease SARS quickly spread across China, causing widespread panic. At the peak of the hysteria accompanying the mysterious epidemic, Ai Weiwei and his brother Ai Dan made a short film together, Ai Weiwei’s first. The film depicts the defiantly carefree attitude of their...
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...
Beijing 2003 is a video about the city that the artist lives in, and its people. Participants include assistants Liang Ye and Yang Zhichao, and driver Wu. The piece took 16 days to complete, starting on October 18, 2003. Beginning below the Dabeiyao highway interchange, the vehicle from which the...
Early in 2008, the district government of Jiading, Shanghai invited Ai Weiwei to build a studio in Malu Township, as a part of the local government's efforts in developing its cultural assets. By August 2010, the Ai Weiwei Shanghai Studio completed all of its construction work. In October 2010, the...
"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.
As the first city hit in the global pandemic, Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, was placed under an unprecedented lockdown. The film showcases the incredible speed and power of China’s state machinery in its fight against the virus. On the other side of the scale is the crushing bureaucracy...
As a sequel to Ai Weiwei’s film "Disturbing the Peace," the film "So Sorry" (named after the artist’s 2009 exhibition in Munich, Germany) shows the beginnings of the tension between Ai Weiwei and the Chinese Government. In "So Sorry," you see the investigation led by Ai Weiwei studio to...
On May 12, 2008, Sichuan province suffered a devastating earthquake with thousands of deaths and many more injured and displaced. School buildings constructed from substandard materials, by corrupt government officials and contractors, collapsed, causing thousands of children to lose their lives....
A Henan opera based on the complete recording of a lawsuit filed against the Beijing Local Taxation Bureau by Ai Weiwei's Fake Cultural Development Ltd, which had been fined a sum of RMB15.22 million in tax penalties for alleged tax evasion.
Liu Ximei was born in 1985 in Xincai County, Zhumadian City in Henan Province. Being born in violation of the one child policy, she was given up to be raised by relatives. In 1995, a ten year-old young lady, Ximei, was severely injured while harvesting wheat. Losing copious amounts of blood, she...
The documentary depicts a complete picture of a chain in the cat-trading industry. Since the end of 2009 when the government began soliciting expert opinion for the Animal Protection Act, the focus of public debate has always been on whether one should be eating cats or not, or whether cat-eating...
In August 2014, Ai Weiwei was invited as one of the participating artists for the Fukushima Nuclear Zone by the Japanese art coalition Chim↑Pom, as part of the project "Don't Follow the Wind". Ai accepted the invitation and sent his assistant Ma Yan to the exclusion zone in Japan to investigate...
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...
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...
Ping’an yueqing investigates the 2010 death of Qian Yunhui, a village leader from Yueqing in the eastern province of Zhejiang, who died under suspicious circumstances that authorities deemed a road accident. The film recounts Qian’s death in which he was crushed by the wheels of a truck.
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...
