In Ai Weiwei The Fake Case, Danish director Andreas Johnsen's intimate portrait of Chinese dissident artist Ai Wewei, a telling moment unfolds in a first-act chat between the usually jovial sculptor and his mother, now 80. Mom reminds her son that she and his dad experienced an even greater degree of persecution in the 1950s, when the face of the Beijing government was an enigmatically smiling Chairman Mao. As mom puts it, modern Chinese history is as predictable as the daily fluctuation of the tides.
Mother: Chinese society is like a huge wave. And our family is always in danger at the top of the wave. There was a big persecution in 1957. More than a million intellectuals were accused and punished.
Ai Weiwei: But you had a good life in Beijing, and suddenly you were accused of being rightists and sent to Northeast China. I mean, did nobody dare to say anything against this?
Mother: At the time, the Party could do anything. You were punished just because you had a different opinion. Times have changed, and today they just use a different excuse. You once asked me if you had inherited something from us. We just showed you what was right and wrong by doing it ourselves. And you learned from us, right?
Ai Weiwei: Yes, but when all that suddenly happened to me, you were surprised, right?
Mother: But now I'm scared. Some of your writings are really harsh. You criticize them too much. If this was 1957, they would have killed you already. I'm worried about you.
This understated but devastating moment ends with mother and her embattled son holding hands while, outside the artist's compound, Chinese government agents seem ready to pounce given the least excuse. As Johnsen's cameras roll, Ai is forced by the terms of his house arrest to refuse comments to the growing army of foreign and domestic media. The government is prosecuting Ai for "tax evasion," a charge, as a young Chinese reporter quips on camera, that just proves to the average Chinese citizen that the government's whole case is trumped up. Meanwhile, the artist is quietly finishing a massive work that documents his Orwellian life. That work ultimately evades Chinese censors and becomes an eloquent cry for freedom at a Milan, Italy museum.
Picking up where a previous film, Alison Klayman's Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, left off, director Johnsen depicts his embattled subject in moments of tranquility – a witty scene shows a younger artist photographing Weiwei as he naps in a lawn chair – as well as in a fighting mood. Late in the film, noticing that a young cameraman has been injured by the police, the heavyset Weiwei charges out of his house to physically confront the cops in a real-life moment that could have been ripped right out of Al Pacino's taunting rant at Gotham cops in Sydney Lumet's 1970s thriller Dog Day Afternoon. If anything, this captivating doc makes the case for how modern China can be seen going through a version of the political turmoil that convulsed the US and much of the West in the 1960s. Ai Weiwei The Fake Case is a thoroughly involving dispatch from a land where freedom can never be taken for granted.
Fed Up You may think you've heard the last of the great movie food wars, but doc maker Stephanie Soechtig, with famed TV anchor Katie Couric as her narrator, unearths some dirty secrets in the food industry's battle, aided and abetted by government regulations and Catch 22-like policies, to keep our national waistlines expanding. Fed Up's insights are centered on the role sugar, an added ingredient in so many mass-produced foods, plays, especially in producing unprecedented numbers of obese kids.
Picking up a decade after Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me exposed how Americans were being fattened up for an early death by oversized portions of junk food, Fed Up presents a compelling case that the nation's school lunchrooms remain combat zones where unwary kids are still exposed to too many empty calories. Try watching this cautionary tale without an extra-large popcorn swimming in calories of artificial-butter glop.