Human Flow

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

I saw this today after having heard Ai Weiwei speak a few weeks ago at the Cooper Union about this film and his NYC project of fence sculptures around the city.

The film documents the plight of global displacement of humans due to unprecedented civil strife and climate disaster - displacing more people than WW2.

It was a bit long but, in fact, that was probably a strategy to mirror the enormity of the problem.

Not moralising, more show than tell, I respect this method of documentary making.

Thank you.

The topic of Human Flow is not something that will give you a good feeling after watching this documentary. Massive human migration caused by wars and persecutions it's something that exists since the dawn of time but with the always increasing overpopulation of our planet it now becomes a real problem as some countries just can't handle such massive numbers of refugees. This documentary is heartbreaking and should be shown to all the right extremists in the world, so that their narrow brain maybe could understand that those people fled their country by necessity, and not to take your job or whatsoever. Most of them if not all of them would prefer staying in their countries if it was not bombed to shreds. The documentary is very well shot, with interesting angles and different stories, mostly sad as the situation is just desperate. I don't see a bright future for the next generation, overpopulation and mass migrations will cause the downfall of mother earth. Director Weiwei Ai did a good job with his documentary but I'm afraid that it won't make much difference. Big up to all the people that try to help others and this daily.

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.

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!