There are, of course, plenty of films that have looked into the Covid global pandemic, but director Nanfu Wang’s remarkable film – which premiered at Sundance and screens at IDFA – manages to take its viewers on a rollercoaster journey as she details the start of the crisis in her native China and its devastating human impact, but also the political machinations of both the Chinese and US governments as each tried to spin the crisis.
With the title In The Same Breath astutely referring both to the medical aspect of the virus but also the poor collective response from both China and the US, Nanfu Wang offers an investigation that features moving on-the-ground material from often anonymous filming sources with astute analysis of the way media and governments responded.
The film opens with fireworks and excitement in Wuhan for the 2020 New Year’s celebrations. In the city where it began Covid was already making its mark, but local doctors were being told to play down the information. On January 1, with the local Chinese media full of excitement about celebrations, a small news story reported that eight people were punished for spreading rumours about an “unknown pneumonia.”
When Nanfu Wang lands in Wuhan on January 19 ready to celebrate Chinese New Year with her family she stresses that life felt normal. Things were soon to change. When she flies back to the US for a work trip on January 23 it is the same day that Wuhan is closed down. As she returns to the US there are no checks at the airport and in the US there is a common line from government that there is no problem for the US deal with.
The film astutely details both the terrible impact of Covid as the death count rises and hospitals struggle to deal with patients, and how both Chinese and US authorities attempt to present their own narrative. But this is constantly balanced by the very human stories both of families who see loved ones die and the healthcare workers struggling to go about their job and deal with the emotional impact of working on Covid wards.
In Wuhan ordinary people struggle as hospitals soon fill up, people die on the streets and doctors who comment are swiftly censored, while in the US health care workers who raise concerns about the impact of the virus lose their jobs. In China, television news reports and state-run ‘documentaries’ talk about ‘good news’ and show films about workers being celebrated by local officials, while in the US President Trump dismisses Covid as a flu. Through repetition, Nanfu Wang emphasises the differences and the awful similarities as both authorities seek to achieve compliance in their own way.
It is a film full of emotionally wrenching moments of first-hand stories and startling accounts of cover-ups as Chinese citizen journalists who uploaded material from Wuhan start to disappear, and as the US finally enters its own lockdowns in March 2020 the film details the impact in families and healthcare workers, all the time acknowledging their resilience.
The director – who made One Child Nation and I Am Another You – aims to contextualise this dark story as well as show the awful impact of Covid 19. The film ends with footage of the 2021 New Year celebrations in Wuhan, which appear worryingly similar to a year earlier, and while she says it is hard to predict how things will end she stresses it could of all have been handled so much better. And as the end of 2021 approaches, that statement feels all the more prescient.
US, 2021, 95mins
Dir Nanfu Wang
Production HBO Documentary Films, Motto Pictures, Little Horse Crossing The River, Little Lantern Company
Producers Nanfu Wang, Jialing Zhang, Julie Goldman, Christopher Clements, Carolyn Hepburn
Editors Nanfu Wang, Michael Shade
Music Nathan Halpern
