Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012) — watch online on iFILM. Alison Klayman's documentary follows the world's most prominent Chinese dissident artist across three years of escalating confrontation with the Beijing government.

By 2008, Weiwei had co-designed the Bird's Nest stadium for the Olympic Games. Then he began publicly documenting the schoolchildren killed in Sichuan's earthquake — in buildings that collapsed because of corruption in their construction. The response was systematic: his Shanghai studio demolished by bulldozers, a beating in a Chengdu police station that left him with a brain hemorrhage, then 81 days held without charge in an undisclosed location. The work continued throughout.

Klayman shot this before his second arrest and eventual exile — a rare document of a dissident still mid-fight. The tagline asks whether an artist can change China. This film's answer is honest: probably not. But he made the cost of ignoring him very high. Stream Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012) on iFILM.