Ai Weiwei shoots 'over 600 hours' of footage for film about the refugee crisis

The feature-length project is due for completion next year and will no doubt include controversial elements

Ai Weiwei has been volunteering at the Idomeni refugee camp on the Greek-Macedonian border (Getty Images)

Controversial Chinese artist Ai WeiWei has shot over 600 hours of footage for a feature-length film about the refugee crisis.

The 58-year-old has always used his artwork as activism, drawing heavily on human rights issues to make hard-hitting and often divisive statements.

He has spent the last few months volunteering at refugee camps on the Greek-Macedonian border, with Reuters reporting that he wants to share the shocking experience with the world.

“It’s a documentary film, we have been shooting for over 600 hours, I did hundreds of interviews,” Weiwei told reporters at Bern’s Paul Klee museum last Friday. “The film is going to come out next year. Now we are still doing last [shoots] since the refugee situation is continuous, it doesn’t seem it is going to stop.”

The artist first visited Lesbos on Christmas Day in 2015 and has now moved his studio there. He has been waking up at 5am to record people arriving in boats from Turkey and talk with those already living in the camp. A professional film crew will be working on the project for the next year, with editing expected to take another six months.

Weiwei has been focusing on the refugee crisis and denouncing Europe’s response to it for the past year, memorably covering Berlin’s concert hall in 14,000 washed-up life-jackets in March and recently installing a grand piano in the Idomeni camp.

Workers attach life jackets used by refugees to the facade of the Berlin Concert Hall

His recreation of the harrowing photo of drowned Syrian three-year-old Alan Kurdi sparked a fierce backlash, with some critics arguing that it was crass, egotistical and unnecessary given the power of the original picture.

Weiwei was also branded “offensively tasteless” when he asked a room of celebrities at a Berlin fundraiser to pose for selfies in gold emergency thermal blankets. Tim Renner, the city’s culture secretary, described the stunt as “clearly obscene, even if understood as an act of solidarity”.