He speaks with NPR's Ari Shapiro.Ai Weiwei is an internationally renowned artist whose works are in the world's leading museums. Ai Weiwei's new documentary, Vivos, tells the story of the 43 students who were attacked in Mexico in 2014 and never seen again. And I think it's a time of a struggle. Thousands of people disappear. Before they built the whole house, as it took years, they have to go to the hospital, you know, by bus. Variety and the Flying V logos are trademarks of Variety Media, LLC. ‘Vivos’: Film Review Ai Weiwei's wrenching new doc examines the tragedy of 43 students "forcibly disappeared" in Mexico, and their families' unresolved grief. © Copyright 2020 Variety Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. MARKIE IN MILWAUKEE Matt Kliegman 2019 Slamdance Film Festival 2019 . That said, Ai Weiwei the visual artist isn’t entirely absent from proceedings. Just as “Human Flow’s” Venice competition berth gave that film an arthouse profile not afforded any of his previous films, “Vivos” should parlay its Sundance platform and its shattering material into select theatrical distribution and broader streaming-based availability.“Vivos” opens on a mist-shrouded rural road, a serene, melancholy tableau sporadically cut by passing traffic. Shared and felt Unspooling in Sundance’s non-competitive Documentary Premieres strand, “Vivos” represents a slight departure from the Chinese artist-activist’s last two feature-length docs, “The Rest” and “Human Flow,” both of which took on the global refugee crisis with heart-on-sleeve anguish — the latter with particular big-picture heft. In so many shows, you can never really see a good ending. Footage of the missing students’ family members going about their daily domestic routines — whether sweeping floors, tending crops or making flatbreads — under the daily weight of unresolved grief is heart-sinking, with their own reflections on these pained, suspended years delivered in candid voiceover.After “The Rest” eschewed the sweeping, National Geographic-style formal techniques that marked “Human Flow,” the approach here is even more restrained: The subjects’ emotional burdens lend the film a weight that doesn’t warrant much further editorializing. The new documentary "Vivos" introduces us to the families whose children were disappeared and the official investigation that did not tell the full story of what happened. Director Ai Weiwei 27 March, 2020 22 July, 2020 On a late-September day in 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were brutally attacked by police forces and other masked assailants as they were travelling through the town of Iguala, Guerrero. All rights reserved. In most cases, the disappearance - you know, in Mexico, it's very common. Visit our website And in many, many other ways, they're the same. He speaks with NPR's Ari Shapiro. Three of the students were murdered. But you don't see there will be a clear, so-called happy ending or result. So that - I'm a self-trained investigator and also journalist.WEIWEI: And I think this is very important to get the full story and to get every side of the people who were involved to tell what really happened to their life.SHAPIRO: I want to ask about your role as an artist and filmmaker. He speaks with NPR's Ari Shapiro. In China, I did the investigation of 5,335 students who disappeared during a 2008 earthquake.SHAPIRO: This was the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province.WEIWEI: Yes, the earthquake happened in 2008 in Sichuan. Simply, they just needed to survive.SHAPIRO: The story does not have a satisfying ending. Vivos, los queremos!” (“Alive, they took them! There is some deliberate, even unsubtle, image-making here that hits home: various incomplete family-portrait compositions, with the missing members present only in photographs. It’s an ambiguous image that gains in power once the film details the events that prompted it. Look at what happens in Hong Kong today. “Vivos” is unsurprisingly a more intimate enterprise, ripped not from worldwide headlines but from a human rights scandal still struggling to be heard beyond one immediately affected, heartsore community. This is a traditional two-hour feature film. Yeah, and his whole family keep taking care - daily care for someone who lost conscious but still alive.SHAPIRO: They built a whole house for him with a room for the nurses and everything.WEIWEI: Yes. Those group of parents are really united, and they really demand a clear answer.WEIWEI: I don't really know. Custodians scrub spray-painted slogans from glass doors, to nary a second glance from departing civil servants. A government investigation concluded the missing students, all men, had been handed over to the local Guerreros Unidos drug cartel and executed.
And so for you as a filmmaker, as somebody who invested so much time and energy in telling this story, is it going to be difficult to leave it behind and move on to other projects?WEIWEI: For me, it's not because I think the story needs to be told.