A Portrait of Migration in the 21st Century
On an airport shuttle bus in Singapore, I heard a Vietnamese mother speak to her daughter as they looked out of the bus windows.
— Do you want to live in this country? Look, there are so many trees!
— Yes.
— If you want to live in this country, you need to speak good English; if not, you cannot stay here. Do you understand?
— Yes.
— This place is a lot better than Hanoi; do you see a single motorcycle on the road?
— No.
— That’s right! There are only buses and cars here! So, if you want to live here you have to study hard. Do you understand?
— Yes.
As we arrived at our stop, the daughter gasped with delight as she saw a couple of planes take off. I watched her mother drag her bright pink and blue trolley school bag and belongings down the bus. Within seconds, they disappeared into the crowd.
As a species, humans have been migratory for centuries; crossing continents (or sometimes, even just states) to call a new place home, have a better life and hope that one’s decendents will maintain what you have achieved — or perhaps, strive for a life that is even better.
In contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, it is clear that the 20th and 21st centuries have been defined by a different kind of migration — one where men, women and children have no choice but to leave their homes because of war, repression, prosecution or simply put, dire straits. The flow of migration across the world has become its own creature; we are merely cells that make up its body, and its growth shows no sign of stopping.
Over the course of a year, Ai Weiwei and 200 crew members amassed hundreads of hours of footage across 23 countries — ranging from the Greece and Germany, where the Syrian refugee crisis dominated headlines in 2015–16; to Bangladesh, which at the time of filming, housed about 230,000 ethnic Rohingya refugees. Today, Cox’s Bazar (southern Bangladesh) is home to nearly a million Rohingya; 720,000 have fled Rakhine state (western Myanamr) since August 2017.
One standout feature of Human Flow was the use of drones. Nearly every introduction of a new country features footage from above, which then slowly magnifies to what is happening on the ground. In a camp in Turkey, we see children gather at a particular spot amongst a neat grid of hundreds of huts, and as the drone nears the ground, you hear squealing and see the children’s delight in watching the drone at work. For them, it was a day that strangers stopped by to film their lives in their new home. For us viewers, the slow burning descent of this drone emphasised how we are all merely tiny units in the grand scheme of things.
Much of the film’s more poignant, tender moments lay with singular interviews or conversations that take place between Ai Weiwei and other refugees or humanitarian personnel. The refugees who were interviewed speak their piece, pause and cry. The camera painfully lingers on them, but they can only mutter: “I have nothing left to say. What is there to say?”
Indeed, there is only so much that can be extracted at this particular point of time. As of 2018, there are 68.5 million refugees across the world (53% of whom are children). It is a pity that Tibetean and mainland Chinese refugees were not featured in this documentary — they are after all part of this global narrative of migration, and have much to say.
Ai Weiwei as an activist-nomad succeeds in conveying his journey to understanding what the global portrait of migration looks like today. He peppers the film with his empathy for the hundreds and thousands who have fled to another country — any country that is willing to take them (he cooks street food, gets his hair cut at a camp, dances with Palestinians). It is significant that he ends the film along the Mexico-US border, which dominated headlines in June and will remain an issue for several presidencies to come.
With Human Flow now part of our oral/visual history, the very idea of migration will remain constant and fresh. Thousands of migrants will continue to make their own journeys in the coming decades— just as how that Vietnamese mother and daughter yearn to make the “better” land of Singapore their future home.
