In 2008, Alison Klayman, a TV producer for PBS and NPR, met an extraordinary man called Ai Weiwei in Beijing. I say ‘man’ and not ‘artist’ because while Ai Weiwei’s deeply conceptual art has made him undeniably famous, it is his humanity in its entirety that feeds his art and makes such an unforgettable impact on all who come into contact with him and his work.
Weiwei, as he is called by his contemporaries, friends, and followers, is a burly man, teddy bearlike, with a jolly laughing face, and a beard that only adds to his general air of benevolence. Slowly though, through over the course of Klayman’s documentary, the steely moral interior behind this avuncular façade starts to emerge making it apparent that Weiwei is a knight in shining armour behind his seemingly soft exterior.
Today Ai Weiwei is famous as the dissident artist who fearlessly stands up to that opaque and formidable edifice that is the Chinese government. In addition to speaking out for every kind of freedom of expression in his beloved China, Weiwei also actively tackles the machinations and the systemic corruption of a government that refuses to be criticised; actively cooking up charges and excuses to implicate and imprison any and all of its detractors.
It is when Weiwei, horrified by the loss of thousands of children’s lives in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan due to substandard government schools, takes up the internet as his weapon to expose the establishment’s shoddiness that he truly draws attention to himself.
As his blog is shut down, Weiwei turns to Twitter, flaying the establishment with short, philosophical, but pointed tweets which soon gain a following of millions of fellow Chinese who call him ‘teacher’ and come to gawp at him wherever he is, whether eating a meal on the street while resisting police efforts to film him while doing so, or at his studio where people turn up just to hand over money to help with him with his trumped up tax evasion bill, slapped onto him by a government that doesn’t quite know how to contain this wayward child.
This film is an intimate portrait of a man, a giant of our kind, who fights with every aspect of his being to try and create some kind of change in a seemingly intractable China. As Weiwei puts himself in increasingly more and more danger by refusing to back down, we the viewers are forced to ask ourselves, what does it take to really change the world?
In light of the recent shameful circumstances in our own country where artistic freedom was annihilated to assuage pseudo-religious concerns, Never Sorry is a must see for everyone in developing societies such as ours where democracy is struggling to rear its head amidst numerous clamouring voices, all of which should be heard regardless of how controversial they may seem. It is only with real dialogue and an unshakeable commitment to
the freedom of speech that any new constitution will truly represent the concerns of all of
our citizens.
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