Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is a documentary film (2012) about Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, directed by American filmmaker Alison Klayman. A Brown Univ. graduate, she met Weiwei in 2008 while producing TV features for PBS, NPR, and AP TV. Ai Weiwei is son of renowned poet Ai Qing.
In between gallery openings, we see him beat up by Chengdu police (leading to a trip to Germany to repair cranial hemorrhage), we see the Government raze his $1 million Shanghai studio (he responds with a demolition party serving river crab, whose name is Mandarin homonym for "harmony"), and his April 2011 detention at Beijing airport. The film captures his rise to one of the best known political dissidents in China. Klayman basically filmed the subject in real time, not knowing where it was going, like the Maysles did in Gimme Shelter (and caught a murder). Critics say that his confrontations with authorities is a form of performance art.
In 2009, Weiwei posts over 5,000 names of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake victims. Chinese authorities shut down his blog, two days later, he joins Twitter. This effort in transparency recalls the publication of the Bosnian Book of the Dead.
Klayman didn't set out with any intention as to how she wanted to portray the State, "But I do think they wrote their part into the film themselves."
Weiwei is very outspoken about not supporting the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The movie poster depicts one "flipping the bird" at Tiananmin square, but Mr. Ai no doubt flipped the bird at the Bird's Nest ! After all, he was hired as the stadium design consultant.
