The coronavirus films showing people in Wuhan at its darkest hour, and the human side of China’s fight against the pandemic
- Fly-on-the-wall documentaries Wuhan Wuhan and 76 Days were both produced outside China from raw footage captured by local videographers
- They are a far cry from domestically made films that uniformly portray China’s coronavirus battle as a victory for its medical personnel’s resilience
Outside a Wuhan hospital, people leave garlands of flowers and farewell notes by a picture of Li Wenliang, the late doctor and whistle-blower who first raised the alarm about Covid-19 infections in the central Chinese city, where the novel coronavirus first emerged, and later succumbed to the disease.
A volunteer psychologist braves infection to counsel distressed patients in the city, only to be told on the phone of her father’s terminal lung cancer diagnosis.
A heavily pregnant young woman, anxious and worn out by the lockdown in Wuhan, jokingly threatens to kill her husband if he cannot buy a cot when most shops are shut.
Such scenes of human trauma, often covert portrayals of grief and desperation rather than outright displays of misery, pepper Wuhan Wuhan, a feature-length documentary by Canadian-Chinese director Yung Chang who, while in lockdown in Toronto, edited 300 hours of raw footage taken by local videographers into the film.
Chang is among a handful of overseas Chinese directors who have made fly-on-the-wall documentaries about Wuhan at its darkest hour. Their work is a welcome departure from domestically made documentaries that uniformly portray China’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic as being a victory for the resilience of its medical personnel.