Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Alison Klayman’s documentary profiles the Chinese art-star activist Ai Weiwei, whose ongoing problems with authority beget increasingly creative solutions. Klayman’s aesthetic sense is a lot less refined than her subject’s, but a more important qualification might be her receptiveness. Ai says early on that he prefers hiring helpers to implement his big ideas (which most often have to do with transparency and persistence), and the filmmaker’s access to him seems, agreeably enough, like a sort of enlistment. Looking cutely aggressive, like some post-punk Buddha, and confronting the surveillance operatives who always seem to follow him around, Ai achieves absurd camera-on-camera standoffs in which opposite tyrannies¡ªof old totalitarianism and new media¡ªstare into each other’s abysses. The essential insight in Klayman’s conscientious yet unfussy portrait is about how the contemporary Chinese Communist Party has produced a culture so desperately in need of jamming, and also the jammer it most deserves.