Movies: Ai Weiwei

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 eth...

After 81 days of solitary detention world famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is put under house arrest. He suffers from sleeping disorder and memory loss, 18 cameras are monitoring his studio and home, police agents follow his every move, and heavy rest...

In the not-quite end-times, a woman, a man, a lover and a water smuggler navigate a tumultuous future city on the brink of a water shortage. A "low-fi sci-fi film" secretly made in China....

Europe's refugees are met at eye level in a film by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who defends the ideals of humanism in the midst of the crisis....

Ai Weiwei’s Appeal ¥15,220,910.50 opens with Ai Weiwei’s mother at the Venice Biennial in the summer of 2013 examining Ai’s large S.A.C.R.E.D. installation portraying his 81 day imprisonment. The documentary goes onto chronologically reconstruct the ...

Ai Weiwei Studio presents the process of creating a Yu opera based on the first trial over Ai's fake tax case....

Fairytale chronicles the making of an installation-cum-performance of the same name. In 2007, Ai Weiwei invited 1001 Chinese citizens of varying ages and backgrounds to travel to Kassel, Germany, for one week each, all expenses paid. This film descri...

"Ordos 100" provides a picture of an Ai Weiwei at the pinnacle of his artistic fame, but not yet in the political hot water that was to give him a different kind of notoriety. The film centers on a grand architecture project in Ordos, to be designed ...

Ai Weiwei is a global star and an enigma. DW followed him for a year for this intimate portrait. The film shows Ai Weiwei at home, at work, and on the road for work, as he prepares his latest series of works focused on refugees and their fates....

Beijing 2003 is a video about the city that the artist lives in, and its people. Participants include assistants Liang Ye and Yang Zhichao, and driver Wu. The piece took 16 days to complete, starting on October 18, 2003. Beginning below the Dabeiyao...

As a sequel to Ai Weiwei’s film "Disturbing the Peace," the film "So Sorry" (named after the artist’s 2009 exhibition in Munich, Germany) shows the beginnings of the tension between Ai Weiwei and the Chinese Government. In "So Sorry," you see the inv...

Ai Weiwei, famous for his large-scale installation work and his dogged social justice advocacy, created a career-defining work in 2015 with @Large, mounted at Alcatraz, the emblematic site associated with egregious incarceration conditions and radica...

Arts documentary, first broadcast before Ai Weiwei's arrest by the Chinese authorities in April 2011, and his subsequent release after being detained for 11 weeks. Architect, photographer, curator and blogger, Ai Weiwei is China's most famous and po...

Twenty years after China’s scandalous “Black Blood Economy,” when a million Chinese citizens were infected with HIV and countless died from AIDS, thousands of rural peasants still suffer the consequences, their plight hidden from the eyes of the worl...

On May 12, 2008, Sichuan province suffered a devastating earthquake with thousands of deaths and many more injured and displaced. School buildings constructed from substandard materials, by corrupt government officials and contractors, collapsed, cau...

Liu Ximei was born in 1985 in Xincai County, Zhumadian City in Henan Province. Being born in violation of the one child policy, she was given up to be raised by relatives. In 1995, a ten year-old young lady, Ximei, was severely injured while harvesti...

Beijing: The Third Ring is a document of the two opposite views of traffic flow on 55 bridges along Beijing’s Third Ring. The entire piece is made up of 110 segments....

The documentary depicts a complete picture of a chain in the cat-trading industry. Since the end of 2009 when the government began soliciting expert opinion for the Animal Protection Act, the focus of public debate has always been on whether one shou...

Art is a tool to set up new questions. An interview with Ai Weiwei about the work behind is installation "Sunflower Seeds", on display at Tate Modern from 12 October 2010 to 2 May 2011. Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each appa...

In June 2008, Yang Jia carried a knife, a hammer, a gas mask, pepper spray, gloves and Molotov cocktails to the Zhabei Public Security Branch Bureau and killed six police officers, injuring another police officer and a guard. He was arrested on the s...