Vitaly Mansky embarks on a journey to track down his old school friends and fellow Young Pioneers with whom, as a child growing up in Lvov, Ukraine, he pledged allegiance to the Soviet motherland and the principles of communism.
Many would later flee the Soviet Union with their parents to begin new lives in Israel. Others, like the Mansky family, changed their names, wiped away the traces of their Jewish family history and stayed.
Mansky travels to Israel, USA, Canada and Ukraine in search of those he once knew so well, to explore their shared past and to discuss dreams and disappointments, discrimination and dominance, homeland and happiness.
Over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II. Human Flow, an epic film journey led by the internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei, gives a powerful visual expression to this massive human migration. The documentary elucidates both the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Captured over the course of an eventful year in 23 countries, the film follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretches across the globe in countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, France, Greece, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, and Turkey. Human Flow is a witness to its subjects and their desperate search for safety, shelter and justice: from teeming refugee camps to perilous ocean crossings to barbed-wire borders; from dislocation and disillusionment to courage, endurance and adaptation; from the haunting lure of lives left.
In eastern Ukraine, society begins to degrade as the effects of propaganda and manipulation begin to surface in this post-truth era.
With vitality, humor and unexpected situations, this film paints an unusual portrait of a group of young friends living in a refugee camp in the middle of the stony Saharan desert. A minefield and the second largest military wall in the world separates this group of friends from their homeland that they have only heard about in their parent's stories. They are called the Sahrawis and have been abandoned in this refugee camp in the middle of a stony desert ever since Morocco drove them out of Western Sahara forty years ago. Trapped somewhere in between life and death, Sidahmed, Zaara and Taher refuse to be bothered by it. They spend their days fixing cars that can't really take them anywhere, fighting for political change without response and together they use the power of creativity and play to denounce the reality around them and expand beyond the borders of the camp.