Pandemic’s early days examined in documentary – The Columbian

Documentarian Nanfu Wangs latest film, In The Same Breath, which premiered Wednesday on HBO Max, had quite a rapid turnaround. Depicting the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January. But its no less thoughtful, carefully constructed and inquisitively insightful than any of Wangs other films, an approach that has become her hallmark in a career thats been marked by one remarkable film after the next.

Wang, who was born and raised in southeast Chinas Jiangxi province, was educated in the U.S. at Ohio University and New York University. Her work has consistently probed at the oppressive Chinese government through an intimate and human perspective, and In the Same Breath turns its lens on how that manifested during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically focusing on the messaging and information, and sometimes misinformation, presented by the state-run news media.

While the Chinese media attempted to downplay the severity of the pandemic early on, including obfuscating the number of deaths, as well as presenting rosy human interest stories about how well doctors were fighting the deadly disease, Wang, who was visiting her mother in China in January 2020 as the pandemic began, sent cameras into the hospitals to capture what was happening on the ground. She contrasts her footage and interviews of grieving families with the propaganda presented in the news media. She then juxtaposes the highly controlled Chinese media landscape, where freedom of speech is forbidden and citizen journalists arrested, with the anti-lockdown protests in the U.S. and viral misinformation spread via social media, where perhaps freedom of speech ultimately led to more misinformation and mistrust. Ultimately, she imagines a world where the pandemic was taken seriously and governments transparently shared information, though that reality will never be an option at this point.

Its a fascinating and sophisticated latest entry in her oeuvre, posing important questions and helping us to unpack the unseen and seen before our eyes, which she has done again and again in her work, which includes some of the best nonfiction films of the past five years.

Her debut film, Hooligan Sparrow has similarities to In the Same Breath, focusing on the oppression of the Chinese government on free speech, this time with regard to womens rights activist Ye Haiyan, who has faced persecution and violence for her protests against child sex abuse. In Hooligan Sparrow, Wang herself, who is often a part of her films, struggles to capture these events for fear of violence and intimidation, and depicts the harrowing process of getting her footage out of China. Watch it on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy, or rent it for $3.99 on iTunes.

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Pandemic's early days examined in documentary - The Columbian