'They are willing to sacrifice everything': Ai Weiwei pays tribute to the Hong Kong protesters

The artist's documentary, Cockroach, tells the inside story of the 2019 demonstrations against mainland China's brutal clampdown - a tough task when he's not allowed to return

When Ai Weiwei was growing up in China, it was customary for people from the mainland to look down their noses at Hong Kongers. We thought they had no serious culture. We thought they were colonial subjects only interested in making money and martial arts films. They weren't political," the exiled 63-year-old artist recalls over WhatsApp from the back of a car parked in Lisbon.

That childhood view gets turned on its head in Ai's deeply moving documentary Cockroach, about the Hong Kongers who took to the streets to protest against overweening Chinese rule last year. It's they who become cultured, utopian and offered political resistance to the mainland's barbarous clampdown.