Ai Weiwei is China's most prominent contemporary artist and one of its most outspoken government critics, working across architecture, photography, sculpture, and blogging even as authorities restrict his movements. The film follows him as he installs Sunflower Seeds in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, a floor covered in a hundred million individually hand-painted porcelain seeds produced by workers in Jingdezhen, the Chinese city that has made porcelain for centuries. Broadcaster Alan Yentob talks with Ai in his Beijing studio and traces how a piece built from a mass-produced-looking material actually depends on painstaking handcraft, then connects that tension back to his politics: an artist using global museum platforms to keep pressure on a government that would rather he stayed quiet. Interviews and studio footage show the mechanics of how the seeds were commissioned and shipped alongside Ai's own commentary on surveillance, censorship, and the risk of speaking out. The result is a portrait of an artist whose work and dissent are the same project.