Three years ago, most people in the United States had no idea where Wuhan was; now, of course, everyone knows it as the place where the COVID-19 pandemic started. This does not mean that we know anything about Wuhan. In fact, given the press coverage of China over the past few years, it is inarguable that most people in the US know almost nothing about the entire country, let alone Hubei province.
For this reason alone, Wuhan Wuhan is an indispensable documentary. Slow, roving drone shots across the massive skyline of the city, panning photography taking in the full breadth and height of Wuhan’s cityscape and eerie fog-filled establishing shots of the city as it wakes each morning along the banks of the Yangtze bring the viewer into the urban design and material culture of the world’s most populous country. These scenes are quotidian: Wuhan is just like any other enormous 21st century city, full of roads, skyscrapers, shopping centers and traffic lights. But these scenes were filmed in February 2020, while Wuhan was under intense lockdown at the height of the pandemic. So there is something otherworldly in these shots as well: Wuhan, a city of 11 million, is empty. Virtually no traffic journeys down its many, many streets and highways. The sidewalks are vacant, the steel bridges untraversed.
That is the setup for Wuhan Wuhan, an observational documentary tracing five different characters as they negotiate life in lockdown. The film features a factory worker converted into a volunteer chauffeur shuttling medical personnel back and forth from home or hotel to the hospitals where they work. His wife is in the final days of pregnancy and about to give birth. Another character is a chief surgeon at the hospital tasked with treating the most severe COVID cases. A third character is a young female nurse working in the same hospital. There is also a mother, with her eight-year-old son, stuck in quarantine in a convention center-cum-hospital after testing positive for what are thankfully relatively minor cases of the dread virus. Finally, the fifth character is a psychologist who has volunteered to travel to Wuhan to help ease the mental trauma suffered by both COVID patients and medical first responders.
What the documentary unrelentingly shows is a Chinese government mustering an extraordinarily effective response to an unprecedented contagion. Wuhan Wuhan also clearly demonstrates that this efficacy owes mostly to the everyday heroics of normal people thrust into what, in February 2020, seemed apocalyptic times. In the face of catastrophe, doctors, nurses and an array of volunteers, most of whom were forced into separate living quarters away from family for the duration of the crisis, nobly trudge off to their horrible tasks of dealing with the pandemic. And they do it again and again, an unremitting bravery that helped Wuhan deal with the pandemic with incredible effectiveness. The film captures a community spirit that animated the actions of the characters, a sense of shared burden as the virus crashes through their lives (a spirit notably absent in this country, where a loud minority are not even willing to wear a cloth mask in public spaces).
Hubei province accounts for nearly 90% of China’s COVID death toll and most of those who died were residents of Wuhan. However, China has lost barely 5,000 people to COVID, while the US death toll is steadily climbing towards one million. Wuhan Wuhan is wholly observational; the filmmakers do not make any overt statements of any kind, let alone political ones. But it is impossible to watch the film from Kentucky in May 2022 and not imbue it with political meaning. It is not, though, a political documentary. It is, rather, a human one, whose final 15 or so minutes, in particular, are so pathos-laden that tears are nigh unavoidable.
Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures
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