Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly USA 2019, R: Cheryl Haines, 76 Min, OV (English)
The story of the film Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly begins with the remarkable exhibition “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz,” organized in 2014 by director Cheryl Haines, founder of San Francisco’s FOR-SITE Foundation. Yours Truly, a letter writing component of the exhibition, invited visitors to compose messages of hope to many of the 176 prisoners of conscience whose plight was highlighted in the exhibition. By the time the exhibition ended, over 90,000 postcards had been sent. The film Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly follows these postcards around the globe—from Alcatraz Island to Beijing, Washington, D.C., and Cairo—as Cheryl Haines meets with former prisoners of conscience and their families to discuss their impossible choices and the comfort they found in messages sent by people they would never meet.