Pic courtesy of HBO Documentary Films
If future generations want to know how the world’s scientific community responded to coronavirus, one of their first starting points is likely to be US director David France’s How To Survive A Pandemic, sold by Dogwoof. The film, screening in CPH: Science, tells the story of how scientists across the world raced to develop vaccines against a virus which has been killing millions.
France threw himself into making the film, which world-premiered at Thessaloniki Doc Fest earlier in March, just as he was completing his previous project, the Oscar-nominated Welcome to Chechnya, which exposed violent homophobia in the Chechen Republic.
The filmmakers and their subjects were given armed guards at many of the events in early 2020 that they attended, which included the likes of Sundance, Berlinale and Thessaloniki. “We were doing that right up until lockdown. We were really on the edge and in full battle mode when we were sent home.”
When Covid struck, the filmmakers suddenly had time to reflect on what they had been through with Welcome to Chechnya. Not that they stopped working. As the pandemic took hold, they called up HBO (their partner on the Chechnya project) to ask for support on the proposed new documentary. Their idea was “to do this dive behind the curtain not just with one lab but with all of the labs and all of the institutions and major players in the field [of vaccine research] and witness what they were doing in the hope we would be able to be there when those breakthroughs happened.”
France and his crew were there to witness at first hand the work of the researchers who were part of “Operation Warp Speed,” the programme to develop a COVID-19 vaccine as quickly as possible.
“We were fully awake to the fact that the vaccines could be failures,” France admits. He knew many of the scientists involved because of his long track record as a filmmaker and journalist covering HIV (the subject of his 2012 doc How To Survive A Plague).
“So many of those science professionals had spent their careers working to try to find a vaccine against HIV and so far they haven’t found any. My experience with them is that they are dedicated, but accustomed to scientific failure.”
It was therefore all the sweeter when first Pfizer and then, a few days later, Moderna, discovered that their jabs would give 90% or more immunity from the disease.
There is a magical moment in the documentary when the scientists discovered that the vaccinations work. The researchers were ecstatic at what they’ve achieved.
France shared their emotions. “I was blown away. I wept when we got that news. I knew that science had done the impossible, the unpredictable, that they had really stepped up and given us what we need.”
The joy, though, soon had to be tempered. As public health professionals kept on pointing out, a vaccine will only work if there is a vaccine delivery programme. That is where the politics kicked in again.
As France’s interviewees had said long before the vaccines were discovered, they were “scared science would be steamrollered.” There were so many different vested interests that scientists sometimes found themselves shunted to the margins. President Trump in the US had been trying his hardest to get the vaccines approved before they had been tested properly. In Brazil, President Bolsonaro was telling his citizens that they “needed to stop being a country of sissies.” This was the backdrop against which the scientists were working.
“We kept following to what we called the ‘last mile,’” France says of how the filmmakers continued to pursue their story, waiting to see if the goals set by the World Health Organisation for global vaccination rates would be achieved.
The documentary features a lot of data and talking head interviews. However, there is an aesthetic dimension to the storytelling too. France will often cut away to show an interviewee’s hands or feet or to home in on a revealing human moment.
“We were keen from the beginning that we were making cinema,” France says of the emphasis on emotion and storytelling as well as hard fact. “At the same time, we were making the historic record of this scientific endeavour which was the most ambitious scientific undertaking of our lifetimes. I felt an obligation to record it faithfully. I think the blending of the two is what gives the power to the film.”
It helps that the documentary has a sympathetic protagonist, Jon Cohen, the veteran Science Magazine journalist who features throughout in front of camera.
“I’ve known Jon from the HIV beat since the 1990s. He is certainly a recognised expert in the field of vaccinology,” France says of the journalist who was invited onto the project as a consultant at an early stage.
Cohen is a seemingly laidback figure who goes surfing when he is not working. However, he is dogged in his research. He is also courageous, ready to call out conspiracy theorists and anyone who tried to denigrate Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who became a household name during the pandemic and had to endure barracking from Donald Trump.
France has followed Fauci’s work from the 1980s onwards. “One of the things he [Fauci] learned through all of that was how to have a thick skin, how to put science first, no matter what the political pressures are…it was wonderful that he allowed us to sit with him over a beer even in the middle of this virus going on…and a political firestorm that was just getting worse.”
How To Survive A Pandemic began shooting in April 2020. There were huge logistical challenges. Early on, during the strictest period of lockdowns, France and his crew filmed their subjects through windows. (They wouldn’t risk going into their homes). Eventually, they decided it wasn’t safe for them to travel even by car and so they worked hard at developing robotic cameras which could be sent into labs to film. (This didn’t really work as the robot kept on bumping into things and subjects couldn’t stop looking at it).
“We retired the robot…instead we had, I think, 18 cameras which we had sent to people around the globe,” France remembers. These cameras enabled the documentary makers to shoot interviews remotely.
Once vaccines became available, the filmmakers hired “micro” local crews they could direct from their homes. “That allowed us to shoot in South Africa without travelling to South Africa, in South America and in the UK.”
As new Covid variants emerged, the filmmaking was sometimes interrupted and travel plans had to be re-thought. However, there was an end-point. Once the vaccines came out, France and his team gave themselves a year to see how the vaccine roll-out was unfolding.
How To Survive A Pandemic is one documentary that is bound to have a very long shelf life. “That was my invitation to everybody when I reached out to them, all of those competing pharmaceutical companies,” the director explains. “Let us come in because this needs to be witnessed; it needs to be recorded. Future generations must know what we did…”
