Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Freedom of expression is so much more than a middle finger.

Director Alison Klayman’s debut documentary “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” poignantly explores the horizon beyond popular gestures of rebellion that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is known for.

Ai, China’s Andy Warhol, is introduced first as a conceptual artist and then as a dissident of the Chinese Communist party.

Government officials shut down his blog, beat him in a hotel and, finally, detained him for three months in an undisclosed location.

For most of the film, Ai and his team maintain a constant news feed on Twitter. Ai is known to international media for both his large-scale art and political activism which, for the most part, are one and the same.

Klayman incorporates outside footage and uses source interviews to add depth to an already complete picture of the artist’s legacy.

But what lingers, long after the film stops rolling, is one seemingly fearless man’s message to a generation more and more aware of its future limits.

By Jaclyn Lansbery