July 25, 2012

Short Takes: “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry”

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

SUNDANCE SELECTS

91 minutes

Knowing what fate has in store for the Chinese dissident artist gives Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry a foreboding air. At the outset, we see Ai, revered for his work at the Beijing Olympics, fearlessly tallying kids killed in the Sichuan earthquake thanks to shoddily built schools. He sues a cop who hits him on the head, documenting each bureaucratic step with cameras and tweets. And when the authorities demolish his studio, he holds a public “celebration.” With each act, you wonder if this will be the one that lands him in solitary, where he will spend 81 days for “tax evasion.” Lockup costs Ai some of his swagger, but the deluge of donations to pay his fine speaks to his inspirational clout and social-media mojo.

This review originally appeared in our July/August issue of Mother Jones. 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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