The most personal documentary ever made about Ai WeiWei will be exclusively screened at Glastonbury Festival 2022 this weekend ahead of the documentary’s release in the UK.
Directed by Cheryl Haines, Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly tells the story of Ai Weiwei’s father receiving an anonymous postcard while exiled as a dissident poet in the 1950s, and how this one small act of humanity had a profoundly moving and transformational impact on both father and son. In the film, Ai Weiwei reveals candid details about his childhood, while his mother and brother recall years of privation during their first ever on-camera interview about Ai Weiwei’s childhood.
In partnership with Amnesty International, festival-goers watching the Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly documentary at Glastonbury will be given a blank postcard and invited by AI WeiWei to write their own message of hope to prisoners of conscience around the world. At the end of the festival, postcards will be sent by Amnesty to prisoners in Bahrain, China, Iran, and Vietnam. Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly is a call to action, extending the incredible reach of Ai Weiwei’s art by asking us to take the issue of global human rights to heart and act accordingly.
This exclusive UK screening of Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly will take place in the Shangri-La Field at the Gas Tower at 4pm on Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th June at Glastonbury Festival.
About the film
Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly directed by Cheryl Haines tells the story of Ai Weiwei’s father receiving an anonymous postcard while exiled as a dissident poet in the 1950s, and how this one small act of humanity had a profoundly moving and transformational impact on both father and son. In the film, Ai Weiwei reveals candid details about his childhood, while his mother and brother recall years of privation on the edge of the Gobi Desert during her first ever on-camera interview about Ai Weiwei’s childhood.
The years in the Gobi Desert, along with his 2011 detention, became the inspiration for his revolutionary exhibition @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, a monumental presentation of new artworks addressing the struggle for fundamental human rights. The exhibition was organised in 2014 by the film’s director and one of the USA’s most important voices in contemporary art, Cheryl Haines.
Following Ai Weiwei’s detention by Chinese authorities, the outspoken artist and activist, though still prevented from travelling abroad, transformed America’s most notorious former prison into a powerful expression of socially engaged art without ever having set foot on Alcatraz Island. The @Large exhibition featured portraits made from LEGO bricks of prisoners of conscience from around the world. Throughout the film, we discover how personal these issues of injustice and incarceration are for Ai Weiwei and the extent to which he wove his family’s experiences into the exhibition.
For the final artwork of the @Large exhibition, inspired by his father, Ai Weiwei invited visitors to write messages of hope to the imprisoned activists featured in the LEGO portraits using postcards imprinted with the national birds and flowers of the countries where the prisoners were being held. The project was named Yours Truly and by the time the exhibition ended, over 90,000 postcards had been sent across the globe. Then something even more astonishing happened: prisoners and their families began writing back.
Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly follows these postcards around the globe from Alcatraz Island to Bahrain, Washington, D.C. to Cairo and beyond, as former prisoners of conscience and the families of those still detained describe their impossible choices and the comfort they found in messages from people they would never meet.
Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly tells the stories of several former prisoners of conscience featured in @Large who stood up for their beliefs and, by doing so, inspired others to advocate for social change. These resilient and relatable individuals include John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who was imprisoned for exposing the use of torture by U.S. intelligence officers; Ahmed Maher, an activist and co-founder of Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement, which ultimately overthrew the government; and the family of Ebrahim Sharif Al Sayed, the former Secretary General of the Bahraini democratic reformist party. Interviews with human rights leaders underscore for viewers how small acts can lead to significant change.
By the film’s end, Ai Weiwei himself is finally free, travelling to Washington, D.C., to see a portion of the exhibition that was on view there. He meets with former prisoner of conscience Chelsea Manning, while others who have been released discuss their incarceration and the impact of receiving postcards, reminding them that they had not been forgotten.
Ultimately, Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly is a call to action, extending the incredible reach of Ai Weiwei’s art by asking us to take the issue of global human rights to heart and act accordingly.
