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

deadline.com:

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.