Opinion Response: Human Flow (Ai Weiwei, 2017)

What struck me immediately while watching Human Flow wasn’t the vastness of the crisis but the small, almost fragile human gestures scattered throughout the film. A mother adjusting her child’s coat. Men sharing a cigarette outside a tent. Someone is making tea on a stove built from stones. These moments were ordinary, yet they carried the weight of people trying to create normalcy in a world that had stripped them of stability. Ai Weiwei doesn’t sensationalize displacement; he lets it unfold in real time, in real faces.

As I watched, I kept thinking about something we don’t always acknowledge: displacement exists on multiple scales. The refugees in Human Flow are pushed by war, persecution, poverty, or climate catastrophe. But in quieter, far less devastating ways, many of us live through smaller forms of displacement too. People like me, who moved across continents to study or to build a career, are also navigating distance, uncertainty, and the slow detachment from the place we once called home. The stakes are incomparable, but the emotional undertones overlap: the feeling of being suspended between where you are and where you belong.

And then there’s another layer-  the expats I’ve seen in Bangladesh. Highly paid professionals are flown in to “oversee” factories or manage operations. We live in guarded compounds, eat imported food, and have our rent paid in dollars. We were safe, insulated, privileged. But also, strangely, displaced. They live in a place but not within it. Our days moved between air-conditioned apartments, office SUVs, and curated social circles. They, too, are far from home, far from their families, far from a version of life that feels fully theirs. It’s displacement wrapped in comfort. No danger, no desperation, but also no belonging. The contrast with the refugees in Human Flow is enormous, yet the thread of uprootedness still runs through all three experiences: the refugee, the economic migrant, and the privileged expat.

This is what Ai Weiwei’s film made me consider more deeply: how the world judges movement differently depending on who is moving. When a refugee crosses a border, it is treated as a crisis. When a student enters a country for education, it is an aspiration. When an expat arrives for work, it is an opportunity. But underneath those labels is the same truth: people move because staying still no longer aligns with survival, ambition, or circumstance.

Throughout Human Flow, people walk endlessly, yet rarely toward certainty. Weiwei shows borders as rigid, almost absurd lines that decide futures with cold efficiency. Watching families turned back by fences or redirected by guards made me think about how borders work for the privileged. A highly paid expat in Bangladesh glides through immigration lines with a passport that acts like a key. Meanwhile, someone fleeing war is asked to prove their humanity before being allowed to step forward. This imbalance is not just political; it is emotional. It shapes how we understand movement, value, and the right to belong.

Another part of the film that stayed with me is how displacement shrinks identity. People who had jobs, neighbours, routines, opinions, talents, suddenly become “refugees.” The label overshadows the person. But Weiwei resists this flattening. He films the jokes people make, the irritations they express, and the way they arrange their belongings or negotiate for blankets. He makes you see individuals again, not categories. It reminded me that in every form of displacement, from the refugee tent to the student dorm to the expat high-rise. The struggle is not just about geography. It’s about holding onto a sense of self.

There’s also a universal theme of waiting. Refugees wait for papers, decisions, crossings. International students wait for visas, approval letters, and sponsorships. Expats wait for contract renewals and flights back home. The context is vastly different, but the emotional state feels familiar: life paused, future pending. Human Flow shows that waiting can be as heavy as moving.

The film also forces a confrontation with selective empathy. We live in a world that celebrates global connection when it benefits markets, but grows suspicious of human mobility when it challenges comfort. I kept thinking of how easily compassion stops at a TV screen, how quickly crisis becomes background noise. Weiwei’s slow, patient filming doesn’t allow that detachment. He makes you sit with the discomfort.

For me, Human Flow isn’t just a documentary about refugees. It’s a reflection on what it means to live away from home, in any form. It made me think about the invisible cost of all movement, forced or voluntary, privileged or desperate. It made me think about how belonging is a basic need disguised as a luxury. And it made me realize how fragile our idea of home is when borders, systems, and circumstances keep shifting beneath us.

Ai Weiwei doesn’t offer answers, and perhaps that’s his point. He holds up a mirror to a world where movement has become the condition of survival, ambition, and existence. And he asks us, without saying it aloud, to see each other more clearly  - refugee, migrant, student, expat, not through labels, but through the shared human need to find a place where we can finally exhale.