Film Screening of "Human Flow"

This epic film by renowned artist Ai Weiwei is a detailed and heartbreaking exploration of the global refugee crisis. Captured over the course of a year in 23 countries, the film follows a chain of urgent stories that stretches through Afghanistan, Greece, Iraq, Kenya, Mexico, Turkey, and beyond. From teeming refugee camps to perilous ocean crossings to barbed-wire borders, ‘Human Flow’ witnesses its subjects’ desperate search for safety, shelter, and justice. (2017, dir. Ai Weiwei, 140 min.) Free and open to the public.*

*Current Middlebury College guidelines allow for visitors to attend approved campus events and programs. Full vaccinations with boosters (or valid medical or religious exemptions) and masks are required. Read more about the Visitor Policy.

Official Selection - Venice Film Festival

“…[An] open-hearted and intricately woven mosaic that travels to 23 different countries (thanks to more than 2,000 crew members) in order to show both the breadth of the refugee crisis as well as its dehumanizing volume… ‘Human Flow’ is an epic portrait of mass migration that understands how a lack of empathy often stems from a failure of imagination. ”—Indiewire

“There are moments in ‘Human Flow,’ a bracing, often strangely beautiful movie by the artist Ai Weiwei, when it can be hard to see the individuals who make up the roiling, surging rivers onscreen. This difficulty in isolating specific people — really seeing them as sovereign beings rather than as an undifferentiated mass — is crucial to the meaning of the documentary, which charts the global refugee and migrant crisis. … What Mr. Ai seeks is to go far beyond the nightly news; he wants to give you a sense of the scale of the crisis, its terrifying, world-swallowing immensity.”—New York Times