Ai Weiwei Double Bill: CPH:DOX Showcases World Premiere Of Artist’s ‘Animality,’ International Premiere Of ‘Ai Weiwei’s Turandot’

CPH:DOX, the renowned documentary festival in Copenhagen, is presenting what might be called an Ai Weiwei double feature.

On Wednesday, the festival hosts the world premiere of Animality, the great Chinese artist’s latest documentary. And later today it welcomes audiences for the international premiere of Ai Weiwei’s Turandot, a film directed by Maxim Derevianko about the artist’s production of the classic Puccini opera.

Animality takes viewers on a journey around the world, examining the relationship between humans and animals – some traditional, like men in Kham, Tibet who tote hay up mountainsides to feed starving yaks, and others industrial in scale, like egg production and chicken processing in Hubei, China, and mink farming in Denmark. In many scenes, the suffering of animals at human hands is apparent and yet the tone of the documentary remains even and nonjudgmental.

“What I like about documentary,” he tells Deadline in an interview at his hotel in Copenhagen, “is it doesn’t represent the single voice, but a more objective observation as a record or, I would say, as some kind of proof… I love documentary only because it reflects the reality, not one person’s opinion. Very often we see documentaries are so much about the maker’s narrative, judgment or taste or style, which I don’t enjoy that part.”

The title treatment for Animality is seen over ancient cave paintings dating back as far as 40,000 years ago when the link between animal and human was intimate and profound.

“Sacred relationship is from the very beginning,” Ai Weiwei observes. “If you look at the cave paintings or early Chinese objects like jade carving, [you] see animals carry an important message as a god. Many gods at that time could be birds or could be a tiger or could be a dragon. But that [was a] time with limited information, knowledge. So, they say animals have equal importance as human beings. But of course, not today. Only thing you see in the supermarket, meat is boxed, wrapped in plastic.”

Increasing urbanization in contemporary society has brought a further separation from many animals. “Most people do not have any real relations or contacts with chicken, pigs, cows, not even to see other animals,” he says. “Disconnected.”

In some scenes of the film, the relationship remains much closer as in Myanmar, where loggers use elephants to move giant trees felled for timber. “The elephant still can coexist with human because humans want to employ them as a machinery for productivity,” the filmmaker says. “You can clearly see that to [move] those cut logs, only the elephant can do that job. And you see how difficult it is doing that.”

Even in that context, modernity intrudes. “But suddenly, the forest is almost gone, and it is forbidden [now] for much forest cutting. And the elephants just lost their job. Not only the animal, the one who feeds the animal also lost their job.”

In Paragominas, Brazil, Animality shows the clear-cutting of the rainforest to make room for more cattle ranching and meat production. This loss of “the lungs of the earth” contributes to climate change and could eventually spur mass migration as people flee habitats that have become unlivable (in this sense, Animality connects with Ai Wewei’s earlier documentary, Human Flow, which examined human migration caused by political and environmental factors).

“I think we cannot just point a finger to a single issue,” he says of the climate crisis. “We should understand the human condition in today’s world where humans existing is a pure miracle, or all other life. But very often, we see the other animals are not ruling the world, but only humans. [Humans] sacrifice other life and dominate too, arrogantly. All arrogance is some kind of stupidity.”

Animality contains many disturbing scenes, like in a part of China where authorities kill stray dogs that are deemed a nuisance (in one sequence a couple is roughed up by uniformed men after they protest the killing of their dog who was mistakenly considered a stray. This recalls a scene in Alison Klayman’s 2012 documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, in which the artist was beaten by Chinese police). Another scene, filmed in Cairo, shows men smacking camels with sticks to herd them; some of the animals have one of their four legs tied up and bent at the knee, forcing them to hop around awkwardly.

“It puts everyone in the position to rethink about humanity,” the director notes. “We [need] only see how we treat animals to understand who we are.”

Ai Weiwei has directed 20 films covering a wide variety of topics. His 2020 documentary Vivos examined the shocking disappearance of a group of students who were seized in Mexico’s Guerrero state. His 2021 film Rohingya centered on the world’s largest refugee camp, erected in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh to house refugees fleeing oppression and death in Myanmar. His intellectual and artistic interests are vast, but he had never considered directing an opera until he was approached about helming a production of Puccini’s Turandot for Rome’s opera house.

In many ways, it was a curious offer, given that Ai grew up in a sonically limited area of Northeast China (his father, poet Ai Qing, was dispatched along with his family to a labor camp in Beidahuang, Heilongjiang in the late 1950s after running afoul of the government).

“I am almost immune to music, not only opera, because I grew up in silence. I have to show you an image,” he says, going through his phone to display a photo of an entrance to a subterranean dwelling. “That’s where I grew up. It’s my father in that black hole. So, no music. We have insects that make this zzzz sound in the field or some birds, but it’s hard [even] for birds to survive… So, silence is my music and [I’ve] never being trained or used to listen to music.”

Nonetheless, he had a connection to Turandot. In 1988, as a young man living in New York with his brother, Franco Zeffirelli cast the siblings in a production of Turandot that the Italian director was mounting at the Metropolitan Opera at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center.

“I heard that they want some Chinese faces in the production,” he recalls. “I and my brother have nothing to do. So we went there [to auditions] and I see Zeffirelli on the other end of the stage look at us, he said, okay, we look perfect, like Mongolian face. So I was wondering what do they want me to do?”

It turned out Zeffirelli gave him a bigger part than Ai had expected. “I found out I’m not just an extra running on stage… They wanted my face to be shown, so they [cast] me as the executioner’s assistant. I have to help the executioner to polish his knife.”

For those performances, he recalls, “We get about $3 an hour. Of course, $3 brings us a lot of joy because Lincoln Center is not far from a 72 Street Broadway, which has Gray’s Papaya hot dog restaurant. You buy one, you get another one free.”

We asked if that meant he got one hot dog, and his brother got the other one.

“No, two for me, two [for my brother]. Then we have a large glass of papaya drink,” he says. “That was joy.”

The request that he direct the Rome opera production of Turandot, then, was one he really couldn’t decline, even if that kind of thing is not his métier.

“It was very difficult,” he concedes. “I know it’s going to be difficult because it is something you can’t completely build yourself. It’s more like to do a renovation to a castle. You have to keep the structure, which is the music, the storyline, but do the total others like design of the movement… costumes and everything else. Which is kind of a struggle because I’m more used to destroy or rebuild. I’m not very good in renovation. I like renovation, but I still feel it’s too many restrictions.”

Turandot, left uncompleted at Puccini’s death in 1924, tells a mythical story of an icy princess who sets a challenge to anyone seeking her hand in marriage. A suitor must correctly answer three riddles to become her betrothed, with a wrong answer resulting in death. Inevitably, the Italian composer viewed China from a Westerner’s perspective, emphasizing exoticism and revenge. Ai takes an innovative approach, modernizing the production in multiple respects.

“Ai Weiwei’s first operatic staging (direction, sets, costumes and videos) is controversial, a gigantic, enjoyable funfair where the artist’s radical and intellectual quirks are displayed in all their glory,” says a review published by Bachtrack.com. “Videos and computer animations from present times are projected, quite unconnected to the plot’s dramaturgy, but dealing with some iconic moments: anti-government protests and their suppression in Hong Kong, refugees in Ukraine, flying bombs.”

Ai Wei Wei is not only an artist and filmmaker, but an activist. There is a political dimension to much of his work, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. In Animality, the viewer is left to draw political or moral conclusions if they wish. His production of Turandot can be experienced as musical entertainment. But even there the story of a princess — daughter of an emperor — allows one to draw comparison to contemporary times.

“As long as human society exists, we have an emperor in different forms in every society,” he says. “Even in Denmark. And it’s just the power may be more heightened, more blurred and people don’t even know who the emperor is… If individuals cannot really exercise their rights and cannot affect the larger political condition, that means certain power is existing.”