Ai Weiwei: Never SorryThursday, October 18 at 8.30pm at BUEIThis film about the Chinese government’s repression of freedom of speech is skilfully made, but at times it veers into slapstick comedy.The film’s subject, Mr Weiwei, is one of China’s most famous artists and domestic critics.He designed the Beijing National Stadium, the Bird’s Nest, for the 2008 Olympics but refers to himself as more of a chess player than an artist. His main ambition is a noble one, to annoy the heck out of the government. This appears to be as difficult as tripping a circus clown with a banana peel.Some scenes veer into the farcical, which destroys some of the film’s integrity. For example, when the police come to harass Mr Weiwei, his assistants videotape the police punching him the face. Unfortunately, the lights are off, so we don’t actually see this. We do hear him yelling something like: ‘Ow, ow, you’re hitting me’ and the police saying, ‘Stop it, you’re hitting yourself’. It’s hard to tell if they really did punch him once in the head, but it’s a scene straight out of ‘The Three Stooges’. I don’t think the footage would stand up in any court of law on the planet.Sometimes Mr Weiwei came across as the sort of person who pokes a dragon in the eye and then complains about the smoke. But his work recording the names of children who died due to shoddy school construction in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake was probably his most impressive and serious move during the film.The Chinese government refused to publicly reveal the death toll.Mr Weiwei calls a government department and asks for the official number of deaths and is accused of being an American spy.His final tally is that more than 5,000 children died.The government responded by bulldozing his entire Shanghai studio. In 2011, they eventually arrested him at an airport and held him for two months without filing charges, all the while alluding to “economic crimes” which would amount to tax evasion. His assistants were also imprisoned.This put Mr Weiwei on the Amnesty International roster as a victim of government persecution, and gained international exposure for him. If they hadn’t done this, I doubt I ever would have heard of him. After several months Mr Weiwei and his assistants were released. Was this check mate?The film is worth watching, but at times, unconvincing.