“Despite his celebrity, Ai never comes across on camera as someone who’s full of himself. In Never Sorry, one of Ai’s workers compares himself to a hired assassin who kills on command, but never questions the order. Ai takes a humbler view of his role, calling himself as a catalyst, not a lone genius. Klayman is similarly modest. Aside from brief appearances on camera and her audible questions, she takes a fly on the wall approach in both verité scenes and formal interviews in her film. Klayman may frame the story, but she lets Ai speak for himself.”
Alison Klayman’s documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry gets a wide release tomorrow. Keith Meatto saw it last month, and wrote about what he learned.
