Out of crisis comes opportunity. Could there be a better lesson to take at the close of 2016 than this? That was the message conveyed by Kevin Macdonald’s latest film, a documentary he created with Netflix titled Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang, which had an intimate screening at the Dolby 88 theater in New York City on Saturday night.
The artist, world renowned by any measure, creates in many mediums—sculpture, painting—but is best known for his work with gunpowder, fireworks, and the clouds of biodegradable colored dust that he shoots into the atmosphere, in effect, painting the air. The film follows Cai as he goes about attempting his most personal piece yet: a 500-meter flaming ladder that, when created by a hot-air balloon, will symbolically connect the earth with the heavens. (This is a mission that has failed during previous attempts, all of which are captured in footage found by Macdonald.) Why 500 meters? “Because in the town where I grew up, 200 people were just some people,” said Cai after the screening through a translator. “Five hundred was a real event.”
The film is a real event. Cai is charming and gregarious and fun to watch, even when he’s confronting difficult spots in both China’s history (the movie does a very able job of explaining the Cultural Revolution in about five minutes, as well as the complications that attend creating art at the behest of the Chinese government) and his own (both his grandmother and his father are incapacitated by old age and illness, respectively). Wendi Murdoch—by all accounts the engine behind the film’s production, as well as one of its producers—hosted the dinner that followed the screening at her home. Murdoch also brought director Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Foxcatcher) on as both an executive producer and as one of the hosts of the screening, joining Jean Pigozzi and Diane von Furstenberg.