Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Background

Klayman first met Ai in December 2008 in Beijing while she was living in China producing TV and radio features for PBS Frontline, National Public Radio, and AP Television. She filmed a short video for his show "New York Photographs 1983 - 1993" at Beijing's Three Shadows Photography Art Centre.

Description

The film follows Ai from around the time he meets Klayman through just after his release from detention by Chinese authorities in spring of 2011. It presents him installing his show at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in September 2009 and his 100 million-ceramic porcelain piece at the Tate Modern a year later. In between he gets beaten up by the police in Chengdu, his million-dollar Shanghai studio is razed by the Chinese government, and he is finally detained in April 2011 at the Beijing airport on his way to Hong Kong and the international call for his whereabouts goes out. For the film, everyone from his brother to his mother to his first gallerist in New York to his wife are interviewed. Klayman deals with every aspect of his career as architect, photographer, conceptual artist, social critic and blogger.

Never Sorry opens in his studio compound in Beijing, called 258 Fake, home to 40 cats, and follows him from the development of his piece where he researched and posted the names of student victims of the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. The Sichuan Earthquake Names Project involves more than 50 volunteers and researchers collecting the names of the deceased students in Sichuan province towns, people Ai culled from his blog on Sina.com. On 12 May 2009, on the one-year anniversary of the disaster, Ai finishes posting the over 5,000 names. Two and a half weeks later, Ai's blog is shut down by Chinese authorities, and two days later, Ai joins Twitter. His Twitter page is still online, and he frequently posts new messages.

Critical reception

Critics accorded the film an overwhelmingly positive response and it has a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Calling the film "galvanizing," critic Manohla Dargis of The New York Times noted: "The fluidity and convenience of digital moviemaking tools explain some of its freshness, as does Ms. Klayman’s history as a budding documentarian. It’s clear from watching both the feature and its earlier iterations that, while she was learning about Mr. Ai, she was also learning how to tell a visual story. It’s easy to think that hanging around Mr. Ai, a brilliant Conceptual artist and an equally great mass-media interpolater, played a part in her education."