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The Rest (2018) is a documentary by Ai Weiwei about refugees, who have arrived in Europe, the world's bastion of human rights, but now live in limbo within a disintegrating humanitarian aid system.

Rohingya is a documentary feature film about the world's largest refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority from Myanmar's Rakhine State who have suffered several decades of persecution by the Burmese government. Many fled to neighbouring Bangladesh and other countries in search of safety. Following widespread ethnic cleansing by the Burmese army in August 2017, a mass exodus of over 700,000 Rohingya took place from Myanmar to Cox's Bazar, where one million refugees now live. Filmed over several months in Cox's Bazar, Rohingya is an observational, poetic record of the community's everyday life, social rituals, and the camp's unique landscapes. It is a document of humanity amid one of the greatest displacements of our time.

A team directed by Activist and artist Ai Weiwei films inside the hospitals, homes, and quarantine sites of Wuhan, the first city hit in the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Ai Weiwei's latest documentary ANIMALITY delves into the multifaceted human-animal relationship across diverse contexts and its intricate dynamics. From cattle in Brazil, camels in Egypt, minks in Denmark, elephants in Myanmar, whales in Indonesia, wolves in Inner Mongolia, fish in Norway to locust in Pakistan and dogs in China, the film calmly and nonjudgmental explores humanity's collective behavior, and our interconnectedness with the natural world in our shared existence.

In February 2019, the Hong Kong government proposed a bill that would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects from Hong Kong to face trial in mainland China. The controversial bill sparked immediate outrage over widespread fear of arbitrary detention and politically motivated trials that would decimate Hong Kong's autonomy under 'one country, two systems.' Protests escalated into epic pro-democracy demonstrations, in part led by young people connected via social media. COCKROACH, filmed during the height of the protests, captures the extraordinary intensity of an unprecedented era in Hong Kong's history.

On the night of September 26, 2014, a convoy of students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College was disappeared by a drug cartel-afflicted Guerrero state. Weiwei portrays the human impact in the families by this event.