‘Vivos’: Film Review

To the individual enduring it, sorrow seems a lonely, defenseless emotion, one from which others are too quick to look away.

Shared and felt en masse, however, it can become something different: a galvanizing force, a wall, not diminished in pain but not diminished by it either.

Ai Weiwei’s stirring new documentary “Vivos” runs on a vast, roiling current of such sorrow.

Portraying the devastated families of 49 Mexican students in the Guerrero region who were either killed or forcibly disappeared following a police raid, it’s a study of grief both in unresolved limbo and in determined action — thwarted either way by a national scourge of institutional corruption that the public is forced to take as given.Unspooling in Sundance’s non-competitive Documentary Premieres strand, “Vivos” represents a slight departure from the Chinese artist-activist’s last two feature-length docs, “The Rest” and “Human Flow,” both of which took on

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