At one moment in Andreas Johnsen’s new documentary The Fake Case, about the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, an ambitious journalist visits Ai’s walled compound on the outskirts of Beijing, where he works and lives amongst a committed staff and stray cats and often surrounded by police surveillance.

It’s hard not to squirm as the British reporter persists for an interview. He had lucked out once before and was in the right place at the right time when Ai first was released. He’s transparent about how big a break it would be for him to get Ai on camera again. Finally, the artist relents, agreeing to be filmed, but only under one condition: he would have to be filmed while taking a shower and repeating the word “decency” over and over again. The reporter protests: “It’s a family program.”

Ai’s obvious distaste for the word “decency” is maybe the film’s most radical scene. Johnsen, following up on Alison Klayman’s acclaimed documentary Never Sorry, resists falling into a black-and-white, East versus West, fettered-versus-free reading of Ai’s world, under the spotlight of the Beijing authorities and the Western media. Ai is matter of fact about the realities of news cycles and appetites. “When I talk in China people pay attention to me,” he notes. “When I’m abroad nobody really listens to me.”

Authoritarian regimes and the folk heroes who oppose them make for good PR for Western political values. Like Malala and Yoani Sánchez, Ai is forced to navigate between using the foreign media to dismantle a totalitarian state and being used as a plaything of foreign fantasies. How Ai attempts this balancing act, juggling the Chinese government’s fears and the hopes of art patrons, is the subtext of Johnsen’s film, which opens in the US this week.

A trailer for Andreas Johnsen’s The Fake Case

Ai is physically changed since the last time he graced the art house screen. While Klayman’s film introduced Ai to many viewers and established his place within Chinese political resistance, from Grosvenor Square in 1968 to Tiananmen Square in 1989, Johnsen assumes a familiarity the reputation Ai has earned and the adversity he’s faced. Johnsen begins his film as Ai is released after 81 days of solitary detention—he now looks thinner and his beard is longer—and follows him throughout his year on probation, as he faces a lawsuit thrust upon him by the Chinese government and continues to make art.

The “Fake Case” refers to the government’s charges of tax evasion against Ai’s design company Fake Ltd. In English, the name nods at China’s reputation for pirated goods, and at the materialist culture that’s taken hold in its cities, places that Ai largely avoided in his architectural adventures. But in Chinese, “fake” is a pun, playing on multiple meanings of the characters fa 发 (“development”) and ke 课 (“class”). There’s a more basic meaning too: spoken together in Chinese, fa and ke sound a lot like “fuck.”

In the film’s title, “Fake” carries even more meanings, mainly highlighting the illegitimacy of Beijing’s efforts to persecute China’s most famous artist-dissident. But the fakeness also hints at the various surfaces, imposed and self-fashioned, under which Ai now lives. At home with Ai, Johnsen’s fly-on-the-wall approach uses the journalism and journalists onscreen to more closely examine how Ai negotiates his own circulation in the media, as a peculiar product of the his own and the world’s imagination. He produces a lot of media, the film reminds us, feeding the demand of a large fan base in and out of China — and a large art market too.

But whenever he talks to foreign reporters, he is also directly disobeying the terms of his probation. (Johnsen uses a hidden camera at times, an echo of the government’s surveillance.) Ai gleefully disobeys the media’s expectations too. After he receives the case’s verdict, one reporter asks “Do you feel like crying?” Ai responds: “Fuck it.”

His liberal use of four-letter words is always, somehow, simultaneously dripping with angst and Confucius-like wisdom. But its his gaze that communicates more than anything he says. Even as the injustices become increasingly predictable, Ai is never desensitized. He is always present, and on his face, which the film’s slow pace allows us to linger on, we can read the rawness of his disappointment and frustration.

As we watch Ai choose who to grant access to his story (other journalists are more lucky than the careerist Brit), we are left wondering how the filmmakers behind the camera achieved such an intimate and privileged vantage point. Ai, even more fatigued with the media’s interests, granted Johnsen access based on his film Murder, about the controversy surrounding Nicaragua’s anti-abortion policies. But Ai insists we don’t forget that Johnsen is there filming through a particular lens—and that Ai is a director too. In one moment, reminiscent of Las Meninas in all its frames and reflections, Ai flips his iPhone camera on the filmmaker, and in a single frame, we see Ai watching Johnsen watching Ai.

The filmmakers are not the only specter in the film. The reality of Chinese surveillance and censorship haunts Ai’s world. Outraged at two men sent to spy on him, in one scene, he steals their ash tray and vows to use it in his art work. The filmmakers let the traces of this espionage, like these used-up cigarettes, speak for themselves rather than shoveling a heavy-handed reading down our throats.

A detention scene from Ai Weiwei’s S.A.C.R.E.D. 2011-2013. The installation is now on view at the Brooklyn Museum.

Ai obsessively documents the world around him with his iPhone and he has a live web cam going even when he’s sleeping, but much of that content has nowhere to go, except into western documentaries. 

Casual mentions of China’s restricted Internet function similarly. One visitor to Ai’s headquarters, a nude model from the “One Tiger and Eight Breasts” photograph, mentions that since the last time she came to the compound a year ago, the address has disappeared from Google Maps. “Neither Baidu nor Google can locate number 258,” she explains. Later in the film, Ai, shocked that he’s received millions of dollars, small notes and bills folded up in envelopes, unsolicited donations from his fans in response to the Chinese government’s fine, reminds us that “my name cannot appear on Chinese Internet.”

The Fake Case paints a subtle, powerful portrait of the cracks in China’s seemingly impervious walls, but it also reminds us of how firm the government’s grasp is over what does and, more importantly, what doesn’t reach its citizens. Ai obsessively documents the world around him with his iPhone and he has a live web cam going even when he’s sleeping, but much of that content has nowhere to go—except perhaps into Western documentaries. It’s a frustrating reality Johnsen’s film depicts, and that it represents too: like so much else, The Fake Case is only likely to reach the West and the students and the intellectuals, not the farmers and common people Ai wants to reach, for the radical changes he so wants to take place.

“If you let me have the radio or free press for one month, I will make the whole thing change,” Ai hypothesizes. He looks tired, but stays stubbornly optimistic. “One day it will all collapse. I’m trying to figure out which day.”