IN THE SAME BREATH
US, 2021, 95 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Nanfu Wang.
During 2021, documentary filmmakers produced feature length films exploring the background of the coronavirus epidemic. This is one of the earliest documentaries – and worth seeing, as it goes back into Chinese origins and initial American reactions in 2020.
The director was born in China, journalist, moving to the United States, starting a family, making documentaries on the US. She returned to China for a visit with her husband and son early in 2020, went back to the US just as news of the epidemic was revealed. While she looked on from the United States, she made contact with a number of friends in China, urging them to film as much as possible, in any way possible and get the material to her. She has drawn on a vast amount of footage to illustrate the history of Covid 19 in 2020 China.
She comes back to the New Year’s Day announcement that eight doctors were being punished for rumours about a virus. She then develops the gradual stages during January, the emergence of illness, the deaths, hospital crises, the government admission that there was an epidemic, but the firm government restrictions on what news could be announced, with various sequences of newsreaders repeating the government line on what was happening with the epidemic, sequences in Wuhan, details of hospital crowding, illness and deaths, and revelations about the number of deaths, burials and cremations.
All the time, there are speeches from the president, huge party rallies, the singing of the national anthem by an enormous range of singers, interviews with local people who believe that the government had done its best to protect them during the pandemic.
In the meantime, the director also chronicles the initial American hesitations, the early protests demanding freedoms, quotations from Donald Trump and other leaders, playing down the pandemic, initial cases in New York City, then the gradual spread, the repetition of illness, hospital crowding, deaths.
The director makes the important contrast between reactions of the strictly controlled Chinese media response, the restriction of information and facts, compared with the reactions of protesters and freedoms in the United States, out in the streets, placards and yelling, violent promotion of “our” rights – but both systems succumbing to large numbers of infected.
While the film offers some revelation into the Chinese experience, a great deal of local sequences, including information that correspondents were arrested and punished, interviews with ordinary people both critical of the government and supportive, the contrast with the US reaction is strong. And the question of which system benefits its citizens more.
