Human Flow

No commentary and no background but lots of shots of Ai Wei Wei looking for a spot in the limelight of other people's sad escapes from poverty, war, starvation and desperation. If every cent of profit is put back into helping or offering hope, then I might return to this sad tale.

Eye opening about mass migration populations but it was limited to Africa.

This movie comes in at a staggering two and an half hour, and does little to make it feel any shorter. With little dialogue the movie feels like a sickening fever dream. It does little but push the narrative of the director. Not an easy watch!

The film is way too long and indulgent of the director's need to insert himself. But the message is far too important to ignore. Watch it anyway.

In a documentary which is by it's very definition supposed to span the global refugee problem this documentary spends all of 5 of its 240 minutes in Africa. It visits one refugee camp in Kenya and a boat of arriving Eritreans (granted this scene is exceptionally powerful). Oh and a couple of shots of 'Africans' in Southern Italy but Ai Wen Wen doesn't bother to give them a nationality, an ethnicity, or a voice.

Two of the five largest refugee populations by country of origin come from Africa. Most counts place more than half of the top ten countries on the continent. By host country, African nations again dwarf European and some Middle Eastern ones.

Like Gaza and Lebanon, some countries host refugees for generations. The world's longest running refugee camps both exist in Kenya. The vast majority of these people are displaced by conflict and yet Human Flow seeks to explain away the African refugee climate to the unpolitical cause of climate change.

The platform is enormous, and yet in a documentary that seeks to highlight complexity, misses an enormous opportunity to tell the many diverse and complex African refugee stories.