난민을 주제로 한 사진 'Human flow'

Venice Film Festival opens with a dose of hard reality
and two flamboyant fantasies, as Raphael Abraham reports

Ai Weiwei’s ‘Human Flow’.

Film festivals are often places of jarring contrasts and Venice this year is no exception. 

Two of these three opening films — Downsizing and The Shape of Water—

are flamboyant fantasies, 

whileHuman Flow is a cold dose of hard reality.

Ai Weiwei’s documentary attempts the near-impossible: to capture and convey the scale of the migrant crisis.

Figures and headlines flash up alongside

wise words from poets and politicians

but the numbers and texts quickly seem

superfluous next to the images of panic-stricken masses amassed at borders

; Syrians scrambling across rivers

; the stupefying squalor of refugee camps

; a boatload of sub-Saharan Africans wrapped in shiny metallic shrouds like

unwanted Christmas presents.

Occasionally, Ai allows images to drift into abstraction. 

Adrone-borne camera rising up over a sea of discarded life jackets begins to look like a gallery installation, 

another overhead shot of an indoor camp at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport recalls “S.A.C.R.E.D.”, 

Ai’s diorama depicting his own detention by Chinese authorities. 

He has faced criticism for some of the methods he has used to draw attention to the crisis but,

for the overwhelming part, Human Flow finds Ai not in artist mode but in activist mode, 

and his approach is unpretentious, straight forward.

Though he foregrounds himself little,

we see him mingling with migrants, sometimes joking and dancing, 

but also unintrusively comforting a mother who weeps until she vomits. 

For all the film’s emphasis on scale, 

these are the moments that linger

: pain, grief and hope etched into the faces of individuals. 

Human Flow does not pretend to reinvent the form and other documentaries 

are more artfully constructed, 

yet in its urgent mission not just to shock us into action 

but to humanise those affected, it is entirely successful.

출처 : Financial Times - 2017.09.04

1843magazine.com