COVID-19 Documentaries: The Politics of Representation and Production (Web Exclusive)
by Bao Feng and Charles Musser

Exhausted healthcare workers in Wuhan, China from 76 Days.

“No matter what the story, there is always another story—the media story.”
Danny Schechter

For the last year and a half, we have been confronted with a wave of documentaries that seek to reveal the realities, the physical and psychic costs of the COVID-19 pandemic. As documentarian Yung Chang has remarked, their diversity of approaches and subject matter can be seen as one of their virtues. COVID-19 has not only profoundly impacted the social, economic, and political life of the United States, it has also reshaped relations between China and the United States. In this respect the domestic and the international often converged. President Donald Trump’s demonization of China (“the China virus,” “the Kung Flu”) fueled anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. As COVID-19 became a global epidemic, Anglo-American news media further stoked this animosity, harping on the ways China handled—or mishandled—the early stages of the pandemic, even as their own governments often proved even more inept. Hundreds of COVID documentaries were made around the globe: while many were seemingly concerned with simply documenting the ordeal of ordinary citizens or those on the front line, they rarely escaped the fraught political landscape in which the world was operating. So where to start? Perhaps with six feature-length documentaries that were shot at ground zero in Wuhan, where the COVID virus first emerged to terrifying effect in December 2019. 

COVID in Wuhan: Four Euro-American Documentaries
Four of these six documentaries were helmed by North America- and Europe-based filmmakers of Chinese descent. 76 Days was co-produced, co-directed, edited, and written by Hao Wu (responsible for People's Republic of Desire [2018]). It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2020 and was short-listed for the Oscars as best documentary of 2020. It went on to receive an Emmy, a Peabody, and other prestigious awards. Wuhan, Wuhan, which also debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2020, was directed by Yung Chang, known for Up the Yangtze (2007) and other award-winning documentaries. Berlin-based artist-in-exile Ai Weiwei could not find a timely festival outlet for his ironically titled Coronation, perhaps because festivals (Toronto, New York, Venice) were reluctant to experience the wrath of the Chinese government but also because they already had two other compelling documentaries on the topic (i.e., 76 Days and Wuhan, Wuhan). It was released online on August 20, 2020. Finally, Nanfu Wang, known for Hooligan Sparrow (2016) and One Child Nation (2019), produced and directed In the Same Breath, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 28, 2021, and was short-listed for the Oscars as best documentary of 2021. After traveling the festival circuit, it streamed on HBO+ in November 2021.  

A doctor and patient from 76 Days.

These Wuhan documentaries all cover the time frame of the COVID lockdown in Wuhan, which 76 Days elegantly frames with its opening and closing intertitles: “On January 23rd, 2020, China locked down Wuhan, a city of 11 million, to combat the COVID-19 outbreak,” and “On April 8th, Wuhan’s lockdown was lifted after 76 days.” They also share various locales, motifs, and tropes. The opening scene of 76 Days immediately inserts viewers into the chaotic world of a composite Wuhan hospital as several healthcare workers in white hazmat suits restrain and comfort a nurse who is desperately trying to enter a hospital room to see her dying (or already dead) father. Her father’s body bag is soon wheeled out and taken to the morgue as the weeping daughter follows, begging for one last glimpse. As producer Jean Tsien has acknowledged, “it was the most heart-wrenching scene I’ve ever seen I think in my entire career.”[i] As the film unfolds, doctors and nurses deal with the dying as well as those struggling to survive. Healthcare workers are hidden behind their protective physical equipment (PPE) and patients are covered with oxygen masks. Only two are explicitly identified in 76 Days—the doctor Tian Dingyuan and nurse Yang Li, but it is virtually impossible to tell hospital staff members apart. Although we rarely see the faces of the frontline healthcare workers, 76 Days takes a strong humanistic outlook, focusing on the ordeal of people—both patients and healthcare workers—who rise to the occasion. Its intense opening sets up the ways that these doctors and nurses become the patients’ family members. Family cannot visit the sick but are often able to communicate with them via cell phone, with attending physicians and nurses holding the phones and serving as necessary intermediaries. They refer to the elderly as gramps and grandma. It is an endearing, heart-rending portrait of people who come together during a catastrophe. This shared, traumatic experience is shown to bring out the best in people as they come together as one big family.

How each of these films ends is a telling choice. Just as it seems as if the hellish ordeal shown in 76 Days will go on forever, the carnage abates, and we begin to see more faces. We finally see Yang Li’s face and learn that she is the head ICU nurse at Wuhan Red Cross Hospital. It ends with Yang Li calling the relatives of the deceased to offer her condolences and to return their personal effects (mostly ID cards and cellphones—one poignantly covered with photos of a young child). Then there are a few shots of people as Wuhan comes to a halt on April 4th in a moment of silence out of respect for the dead, signaled by a blaring siren.   

In Wuhan, Wuhan, Yin a driver holds his baby, delivered under quarantine.

Besides the persevering doctors and nurses, 76 Days contains a narrative trope that appears in many documentaries on the COVID pandemic: the birth of a baby. In 76 Days, a woman in labor arrives from another hospital and the staff perform a C-section. The baby is taken to a nursery, separated from her COVID infected mother. Later nurses are shown feeding the babies whose parents are hospitalized or in quarantine. Only at the film’s end are mother, father, and baby reunited as a family.

With Wuhan, Wuhan, Yung Chang’s approach to his footage in postproduction was shaped by an anti-Asian incident that he experienced while out strolling with his daughter in a Toronto suburb. He subsequently “channeled [his] anger and confusion around this incident into this film by trying to humanize as much as possible the people of Wuhan city.” [ii] The film opens with an eerie peacefulness—drone shots of the quiet, mostly deserted city. Cutting in from the exterior of a massive apartment building, the scene shifts to a man calmly making breakfast. He does not wear a mask. This is Lin, a factory worker and volunteer medical driver. He and his pregnant wife Xu constitute one of five storylines interwoven throughout Wuhan, Wuhan. Xu is in bed, listening to the radio offering news about a stricken nurse. The disembodied voice declares, “I believe she will recover.” Lin brings her breakfast. They talk about his job: she is worried that he will catch COVID and wants him to stop driving healthcare workers to the hospital. He insists it is not as dangerous as she thinks. Only then does he get into his hazmat suit and begins his day’s task of ferrying medical staff to and from work. Soon we are in the hospitals and the documentary shifts its attention. There is a mother taking care of her young son; not seriously sick, they are impatiently waiting for their third negative COVID tests so they can go home. The young nurse Susu, doing her best, is another character. A fourth strand involves a psychologist counseling patients and staff who are suffering from the traumatic effects of the pandemic. Chang’s documentary concludes with the birth of Lin and Xu’s daughter, patients leaving the hospital, and Wuhan’s return to a semblance of normal life. Jung Chang and Hao Wu are working at different ends of the cinema-vérité spectrum—the cinematographers for 76 Days operate in discrete spaces and film whatever action comes their way while cinematographers for Wuhan, Wuhan generate more polished and deliberate images that follow specific people going about their everyday lives. Both films show ordinary people on the frontlines of the COVID pandemic and avoid interviewing medical experts or government authorities. They offer neither a policy overview nor a delineated pandemic timeline. They are less about China (the state) and more about the Chinese people as they cope with the pandemic.  

Wuhan’s empty train station in Ai Weiwei’s Coronation.

From the opening drone shot of a deserted railway station, Ai Weiwei’s Coronation is dominated by an oppressive urban grayness and quickly establishes the mood of a dystopic sci-fi film. As if trying to make sense of this strange world, the film captures fragments of longer narratives. Ai Weiwei is concerned with process more than with people—often with the bureaucratic procedures that individuals must endure: How a friend returning to Wuhan must negotiate deserted gas stations and ghost-like hotels, temperature checks with malfunctioning thermometers, and government passes. How a doctor puts on multiple layers of PPE and later takes them off following the directions of a supervisor who observes his every move on closed-circuit TV. How disinfectants are sprayed throughout the city. How a construction worker, who was brought to Wuhan to build an emergency hospital, lives in an underground garage: trying to return home once his job is completed, he faces endless bureaucratic runarounds and the final realization that he is stuck there until the lockdown is lifted. No baby is born in Coronation. Nor is there a particular focus on the dying and dead until the end when Zhang Hai tries to make arrangements to pick up his father’s ashes and his unsuccessful efforts to get the necessary permissions. The final scene shows people picking up the ashes of their deceased relatives and, most poignantly, an official crushing a bag of ashes so it will fit in an urn. It is a cold, brutal end: while similar to the ending of 76 Days, when nurse Yang Li calls relatives of the deceased, it lacks her empathetic expressions of condolences as well as the redemptive sense of a city returning to life. In Coronation the state is a frequent but slightly removed or displaced presence. Its final intertitle might be contrasted to 76 Days as well:

The first case of Covid-19 appeared in Wuhan on December 1st, 2019. For several weeks officials concealed information about the virus’ human-to-human transmission and its infection and mortality rates. On January 23rd, 2020, Wuhan was put under lockdown.

BY AUGUST 2020, Covid-19 has spread to over 200 countries with more than 17 million confirmed cases and 700,000 deaths.

Ai Weiwei’s final intertitle expands the pandemic’s chronology, going back to the first documented case and continuing to the time of Coronation’s release.

In contrast to the previous three COVID documentaries, which foreground a range of cinéma- vérité strategies, Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath is an intimate essay film, in which her personal connection to COVID-19 is made evident. It is also an impressive piece of investigative journalism in which her narration contextualizes and frequently sources her material. If it is the most personal, it is also the most ambitious. The first third of the film provides a fuller, more distressing picture of what transpired in Wuhan than its three predecessors. Although Nanfu Wang occasionally brings us into the hospital, her documentary often focuses on what is happening outside it—as people vainly attempt to have their loved ones admitted. Ambulances arrive with critically ill patients only to be told that there are no beds, and the person will die before they can be admitted. Should these COVID victims wait in vain for admission to a hospital or be taken back home to die with family?

A US-based COVID protest in Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath.

In the Same Breath is consistent with Nanfu Wang’s earlier criticisms of the Chinese state as evident in her previous documentaries Hooligan Sparrow (2016) and One-Child Nation (2019). She reveals a very personal source, however, for her outrage: lacking information about the COVID virus that was being suppressed by the Chinese government, she took her two-year-old son to visit his grandmother in the Wuhan area on January 19th, just four days before the lockdown. This experience and her frantic search for information effectively launched the film’s production. The picture starts with Wuhan’s celebration of the New Year 2020, as President Xi delivers a speech promising prosperity and a bright future, followed by a carefully orchestrated state performance of “My Motherland and I.” Later that day, an easily overlooked news report went out that eight doctors were being punished for spreading rumors about an unknown pneumonia. (Wang returns to this news report throughout the course of the film—the sign of a missed opportunity and state ineptitude.) Wang reflects on Wuhan’s 2020 New Year’s celebration as a final moment of apparent normality that was actually a mass viral spreading event. Later, as state television was broadcasting the annual gathering of the Hubei Province leadership offering optimistic pronouncements of prosperity, social media was showing long lines of stricken people outside hospitals.

Nanfu Wang’s ability to find telling instances of the emerging pandemic is extraordinary. She located a forum on social media for those who tested positive for COVID but could not get treatment because hospitals were overwhelmed. They upload their IDs and phone numbers in the hopes of getting access to care. She later follows up to find out what happened to them, and hears a sad litany of many, many deaths. Unable to get doctors at state hospitals to speak, she turns to those who were running private clinics, notably Chen Runzhen. Chen and her husband had a clinic near the seafood market that was ground zero of the COVID pandemic. They were treating workers with pneumonia-like symptoms in late December (documented by surveillance videos from the clinic). When her husband fell ill, they sought to get him treatment in Wuhan hospitals—at the very moment that the doctors in those hospitals were being punished for spreading rumors. Repeatedly denied admittance, he ultimately died. This kind of investigative journalism and the resulting connections is one of several factors that make In the Same Breath such an impressive, moving achievement. 

Halfway through the film (forty-seven minutes into a ninety-seven-minute film) Nanfu Wang turns to the United States, where the failings of its government duplicated that of China or were perhaps even worse. Like the Chinese government and state media, President Trump and his medical experts repeatedly reassured the American public that they are safe, and the virus is not of concern. Dr. Anthony Fauci only added to this misinformation, insisting masks were not needed when in fact the administration was concerned with shortages of PPE for frontline workers. Wang interviews nurses who were outraged that their hospitals were not making plans for the imminent pandemic. Many were even expected to deal with COVID patients without PPE. Those who publicly voiced their concerns were told to shut up and not create panic. In some cases, they were fired. Nanfu Wang allows them to voice the emotional devastation that they experienced as they took care of patients, many of whom were dying. In the Same Breath then connects the distress of American healthcare workers to those working in Wuhan’s hospitals through successive shots of their faces registering distress.

Nanfu Wang dwells on communist propaganda that puts a positive spin on the Wuhan lockdown. After looking at hundreds of examples of state media, she discerns the repetition of certain kinds of positive stories, which she visually summarizes. China’s success at containing and then eliminating the COVID virus is celebrated while the costs and structural problems that led to its devastating impact on Wuhan are set aside. She is particularly outraged by the many stories of babies being born during the pandemic—the miracle of life being renewed in the face of large-scale death. Wang seems to suggest that the humanism of Wuhan, Wuhan and 76 Days, with their scenes of babies being born, played into the hands of Chinese state propaganda. Needless to say, In the Same Breath does not contain such scenes.

Yin and his wife, Xu, a tour guide (Wuhan, Wuhan).

In the final third of In the Same Breath, Nanfu Wang turns to a broader reflection on the nature of freedom, and most specifically freedom of expression. Her cinematographer was threatened with arrest when he tried to film at a Wuhan funeral home. City residents were told to bury their dead quickly with little fanfare. She considers citizen journalist Chen Qiushi, who posted videos on Weibo and YouTube, which showed what was happening in Wuhan during the early stages of the pandemic. He was arrested. Lest they be forgotten, she identifies more than a dozen activists who have been arrested or disappeared for documenting Wuhan’s outbreak. The freedom to speak up and tell the truth would seem to be straightforward, but Nanfu Wang then segues to Americans protesting government efforts to contain COVID through masks and lockdowns. As a result of social media posts, many don’t believe the virus is real or that the state has a right to curtail their freedoms: they should be free not to wear masks, free to gather in large groups, and free to carry guns. This freedom has severe consequences not only for themselves but also for others. Their hostility to science and truth is distressing. Wang also argues that China’s government has not been truthful as to the death toll. Official state records indicate that 3,869 people died of COVID in Wuhan. Through interviews and other statements, Wang gathered information indicating that the number was more accurately between 20,000 to 30,000. 

Nanfu Wang’s documentary is the only one of these four to draw parallels between what happened in Wuhan and the United States. Might she have pursued such comparisons more systematically? As in the United States, China had to contend with fallacious social media postings even as it saw others as a threat to public order.[iii] American governmental entities were also known to undercount the number of COVID cases and subsequent deaths. We now know, for instance, that Andrew Cuomo’s administration underreported nursing home deaths by 12,000.[iv] What does it mean that Nanfu Wang’s estimate of actual deaths in Wuhan is only half the number for New York State alone (roughly 55,000), where she and her family live? Such comparisons raise other questions. How much should the Chinse government be blamed for its initial ineptitude when the same failings were duplicated by the governments around the world (above all that of the United States)—even when the world was forewarned by what was happening in Wuhan?

76 Days and Wuhan, Wuhan remind us that ordinary Chinese citizens were the first victims of the pandemic and ask us to sympathize with their experience and admire their fortitude and kindness to each other in a period of overwhelming crisis. Underneath Coronation’s distanced irony, Ai Weiwei expresses a deep frustration with bureaucratic ineptitude and sympathizes with the predicament that many people encountered in the course of filming. Nanfu Wang’s earnest, very personal film essay vocalizes her sense of being trapped between two dysfunctional systems in which one lacks basic freedoms of expression that might have stopped or at least mitigated the pandemic and the other in which “freedom” leads to irrational, frightening entitlement that ensure the virus’s proliferation. She does not show us babies being born as symbols of new life and hope, but she does show us her family, in particular her adorable two-year old son. What will his future be like is an open question.

A woman in a Beijing theater watches Days and Nights in Wuhan (Photo Credit:  REUTERS/Thomas Peter).

COVID Documentaries: A Distinctive Mode of Production
The different politics of these four documentaries must also be understood in light of their respective production histories. They all shared similar collaborative arrangements in terms of production and postproduction: a producer/director/editor based outside of China relied on footage shot by a group of intrepid Wuhan-based cinematographers who prowled Wuhan’s alley ways and the halls of its hospitals, putting their lives on the line and risking state harassment. For Coronation, Berlin-based Ai Weiwei worked with fourteen Wuhan-based cinematographers who shot roughly five hundred hours of footage.[v] Their names in the final credits are transliterated into English but lack the corresponding Chinese characters. As a result, it is difficult to identify them with any certainty: is Peng Liming the Peng Liming who is affiliated with the Law School at Wuhan University? Is Chen Bing an Associate Professor with the School of Mechanical Science & Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan? If so, one might wonder about the blowback of their public affiliation with Ai Weiwei’s undertaking, given the government’s treatment of other citizen journalists. But their names are more likely homophones, pen names, or even inside jokes.

Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath also credits fourteen different cinematographers, roughly half of whom were based in Wuhan. Her documentary is easily the most critical of the Communist Chinese government, and she took extensive precautions to protect the identities of those filming for her in Wuhan. As she told Matt Fagerholm of RogerEbert.com, “We didn’t let any of our collaborators know what the other crew members were doing—such as what the other camera people were filming—or what the bigger picture would be. The reason for that was to provide reasonable deniability if the authorities questioned them.”[vi] Nanfu Wang is the only one of these filmmakers who has her cinematographers explain their reasons for filming and sharing material with her (while masked or otherwise disguised). One: “I was a journalist before and now I’m a freelance photographer. Seeing what’s happening here saddened me, so I wanted to do something.” Another: “I want to do something that is meaningful.” A third: “I’ll be honest. I’m doing it because I want to be paid.” She also shows footage of patients who refused to discuss their situation for the camera. Her narration explicitly comments on her directorial requests and the strategies that her camerapeople deployed to gather their material. She deconstructs the process of her filmmaking by constantly commenting on it. This inscription of the process of production is pursued here with enlightening tenacity. It also draws a line between the Chinese state and the Chinese people—or tries to do so. 

For 76 Days, Hao Wu likewise assembled the film from afar, using footage primarily supplied by Wuhan-based Weixi Chen and a photojournalist who chose to remain anonymous because he was worried that he would face state disapproval. These two are also credited as co-directors. At one point, they ended their collaboration with Hao Wu, but after Wu shared a cut of the film with them, it resumed. Here, too, was an intrepid crew of independent filmmakers dodging the Chinese state to get their precious footage. At least that is how the film’s production history was presented.[vii] Jung Chang was likewise involved in a somewhat similar arrangement, creating a film out of footage shot by various cinematographers in Wuhan. To fully appreciate the circumstances of their production, it becomes necessary to consider two other COVID documentaries, made for theatrical release in China. 

Two COVID Documentaries Made in China
Two Wuhan-focused COVID documentaries were made in China for theatrical release. The first, Days and Nights in Wuhan, was directed by Cao Jinling and premiered on January 23rd, 2021—the first anniversary of the Wuhan lockdown (and also the day that 76 Days debuted on MTV).[viii] As Cao Jinling explained, “My intention is to explore how people fight, how they live and how they love when there are many impermanences and sufferings in life. I hope the film could become a shimmering light in the darkness, the sparkler in the coldness.”[ix] A Reuters reporter, however, saw the film somewhat differently: “China premiered a patriotic documentary film on Friday to mark the one-year anniversary of Wuhan’s coronavirus lockdown, part of a broader effort by authorities to cast the government’s early response to COVID-19 in a positive light.”[x]

The biggest surprise is that Days and Nights in Wuhan contains more than a dozen scenes that also appear in 76 Days. Shot with the same camera, they include the most memorable. The scene of nurse Su Jie, Cardiology Head Nurse at Wuhan Red Cross Hospital, struggling to reach her dead or dying father, is the climactic scene in Days and Nights of Wuhan, not the opening gambit as in 76 Days. The birth of the baby and Yang Li handing cell phones to the next of kin are also shared. Hao Wu and Cao Jinling were drawing from the same archive of materials and to the same effect. Instead of Wu’s intrepid, dangerous undertaking by independent filmmakers, we have something else. As Reuters characterizes Days and Nights of Wuhan: “The documentary, a co-production between state media and the Hubei Propaganda Department, was released in theatres nationwide and features tearful scenes inside Wuhan’s hospitals, including medical staff tending to patients and shots of empty streets.” The Reuters report is somewhat reductive, skipping a small but important step. The thousand hours of news footage accumulated by the Hubei Propaganda Department, which was shot by some thirty local news cinematographers in a cinema-vérité style, was acquired by 1905 Pictures.[xi] 1905 Pictures is “a subsidiary of, and fully funded by state-owned China Movie Channel and 1905. It is part of a joint venture with Jiaflix to provide streaming content for the Chinese market.”[xii] 1905 Pictures then hired screenwriter Cao Jinling to direct what became Days and Nights in Wuhan.

Comparison frame enlargements of head nurse Yang Li as she returns the personal effects of COVID victims to next of kin: 76 Days (top) Days & Nights in Wuhan (below).

Hao Wu claimed to be working from 250 hours of material, most of which must have been culled from this same archive.[xiii] As it turns out, the photographer who took the scene of Su Jie in the throes of grief was interviewed while promoting Days and Nights in Wuhan: it is Chen Zhuo.[xiv] Did he surreptitiously download his video files to Hao Wu even as he was employed by state media? Did he really film all the key scenes in 76 Days? Since 1905 Pictures had acquired rights to the news footage, Wu was forced to deal with that company to gain permissions and rights. Indeed, negotiating with 1905 Pictures may account for what Hao Wu describes as the temporary breakdown around permissions—should this material be made available to a U.S.-based filmmaker? After seeing Hao Wu’s cut of the film, they apparently relented. Did they also give him access to other raw footage shot by cinematographers working for the Hubei Propaganda Department? To what extent is Anonymous not just Chen Zhuo but some of the thirty-one news video journalists who are listed in the end credits of Days and Nights of Wuhan? In either case, neither filmmaker was entirely limited to this archive. Cao Jinling did some additional filming in October 2020, which was used to frame her documentary. Likewise, Hao Wu collaborated with independent cameraman Weixi Chen, who had worked for Tencent News and won awards. But the treasure trove of material controlled by 1905 Pictures was key to the film and far too enticing to resist, as producer Jean Tsien acknowledged,[xv]

Chen Zhuo, a photojournalist for Changjiang Daily (based in Wuhan), who shot key scenes that appeared in both Days and Nights in Wuhan and 76 Days is Interviewed on CCTV Channel 6, China's official movie channel.

Is Days and Nights in Wuhan an official piece of communist propaganda as Reuters would have it, while 76 Days is a radical, subversive achievement? Hardly. Their humanistic point of view and style are remarkably similar. Although their shared scenes were cut somewhat differently, their editing was not striving for a different politics. In fact, one of Cao Jinling’s two editors was Huang Zimo, who is based in West Hollywood: Cao Jinling probably met Huang Zimo while she was studying filmmaking at USC. In the “it’s a small world” category, Huang Zimo was also an editor on Wuhan, Wuhan—and co-edited both films remotely, with Jung Chang based in Toronto and Cao Jinling in Bejing. Did he see 76 Days at some point (at the Toronto Film Festival?) and then deploy some of that knowledge in the editing of Days and Nights in Wuhan? Correspondingly, the work-in-progress cut that Hao Wu submitted to Chinese authorities (1905 Pictures?) would have been a useful jumping off point for Days and Nights in Wuhan as well. Both seems likely. With digital media there is no “original” and in this instance no exclusive rights. Moreover, artistic influence or indebtedness—too often unacknowledged—can move in any number of directions.

The second documentary, Gong Cheng’s The Story of Wuhan’s Lockdown, won a second prize at the Changchun International Film Festival though it has yet to be released. CCTV (China Central Television) sent director Gong Cheng and several camera crews to film this COVID documentary and they arrived in Wuhan a day before lockdown, eventually shooting three hundred hours of video. Starlight Media, producers of Crazy Rich Asians, subsequently acquired rights to the footage and then asked Jung Chang to make an international version from this material. Despite some initial hesitancy, Chang agreed. Although initial press reports referred to Gong Cheng as a co-director on the project, he was not involved in its postproduction and his name had disappeared from the end credits (and the film’s Website) by the time of the film’s premiere. Reflecting the complexities and often fraught nature of these East–West collaborations, Yung Chang was under the impression that the footage he had been given was shot by several camera crews trapped in Wuhan after their documentary on the Yangtze River was aborted due to pandemic.[xvi] He also understood that the situation was a mutually agreeable one and that Gong Cheng was making a version for domestic Chinese audiences. Gong Cheng, however, was told his film was for international release and was apparently unaware of Wuhan, Wuhan until Bao Feng informed him of its existence.

Were Hao Wu and Jung Chang participating in a complicated media game? China state media must have realized that documentaries made by mainland Chinese filmmakers would have been discounted as self-serving propaganda—as the case of Days and Nights in Wuhan would confirm. Their films would never get into prestigious film festivals, shown in U.S. movie theaters and acquired by prominent streaming services. They must have decided to turn the footage over to respected Western-based filmmakers, who would be free to shape the material however they chose. The raw footage they provided was irresistible. With 76 Days and Wuhan, Wuhan, Hao Wu and Jung Chang sought to counter anti-Chinese hate and violence in North America—and in the process humanized the people of Wuhan. These “nonpolitical” films were quietly doing political work, somewhat in the tradition of Christine Choy’s Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987). They stood against white nationalism. In terms of the politics of representation, they are little different from Matthew Heineman’s documentary The First Wave (2021), filmed at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

Although it is a truism that documentaries are made in the cutting room, one might hope that the credits for both films will eventually be amended to reflect the contributions of the mainland China production personnel. We also hope that The Story of Wuhan’s Lockdown will see the light of day. Perhaps someday, in happier post-COVID times, we can even look forward to a friendly panel discussion featuring Cao Jingling, Gong Cheng , Hao Wu, and Jung Chang.

Bao Feng is associate professor of Media Science and director of the International Documentary Center at Northeast Normal University in China. She edited Frontiers in Global Documentary Theory and Practice (2020). Feng is currently co-writing a book-length study on COVID documentaries with Charles Musser.

Charles Musser is a professor at Yale University where he teaches courses in documentary production and critical studies. His many publications include articles on Errol Morris, Union Films, and William Greaves. He is currently co-writing a book-length study on COVID documentaries with Bao Feng. 

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 3


End Notes:

[i] Matthew Carey, ‘76 Days’ Team On Building Their Covid Film Around Dramatic Wuhan Footage: “So Much Raw Emotional Power” – Contenders TV Docs + Unscripted,” Deadline, 1 May 2021; https://deadline.com/2021/05/76-days-hao-wu-jean-tsien-interview-contenders-tv-1234748388/ (accessed, 24 December 2021)

[ii] Yung Chang, Interview, “To Cut Through the Stigma of Wuhan Being This ‘Virus City’ : Yung Chang on His Hot Docs-Premiering Wuhan Wuhan,” Filmmaker Newsletter, 29 April 2021 , https://filmmakermagazine.com/111601-to-cut-through-the-stigma-of-wuhan-being-this-virus-city-yung-chang-on-his-hot-docs-premiering-wuhan-wuhan/#.YZwupFNOlAY (accessed, 22 November 2021).

[iii] “Gravitas: Wuhan Coronavirus: Six videos that triggered a panic,” WION, 17 February 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxCbD0SVVIk&t=277s (accessed 22 April 2022).

[iv] Anurag Maan and Barbara Goldberg, “New York governor reveals 12,000 more COVID-19 deaths than previously counted,” Reuters, 26 August 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-governor-reveals-12000-more-covid-19-deaths-than-previously-counted-2021-08-25/ (accessed 22 April 2022).

[v] Ian Johnson, “From Ai Weiwei, a Portrait of Wuhan’s Draconian Covid Lockdown, New York Times, 21 August 2020.

[vi] Matt Fagerholm, “It Didn’t Take Long for Me to Feel Empathy: Nanfu Wang on In the Same Breath,” rogerebert.com, 17 August 2021, https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/it-didnt-take-long-for-me-to-feel-empathy-nanfu-wang-on-in-the-same-breath. (accessed 23 April 2022).

[vii] Matthew Carey, “’76 Days’ Team On Arduous Journey To Complete Emmy-Nominated Doc: ‘We Knew The Film Needs To Be Made’,” Deadline, 21 August 2021, https://deadline.com/2021/08/76-days-director-hao-wu-producer-jean-tsien-mtv-documentary-films-interview-news-1234822248/ (accessed 23 April 2022); Sheri Linden, “’76 Days’: Film Review | TIFF 2020,” Hollywood Reporter, 14 September 2020, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/76-days-review-4057572/ (accessed, 23 April 2022).

[viii] 76 DAYS (2020) - MovieXclusive.com (https://www.moviexclusive.com/movie/76-days-2020 (accessed 22 April 2022)

[ix] 没画外音也没编台词,纪录片《武汉日夜》在传递一种信念, BJNews, 22 January 2021,

https://www.bjnews.com.cn/detail/161131222715550.html (accessed 22 April 2022).

[x] Reuters Staff, “'Heroic hymn of the people': Chinese government film marks year since Wuhan lockdown,” 22 January 2021; https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-wuhan-documentary/heroic-hymn-of-the-people-chinese-government-film-marks-year-since-wuhan-lockdown-idUSKBN29R1FY (accessed 23 December 2021)

[xi] 南方特稿|《武汉日夜》幕后:那抖动的镜头,是摄影师在哭泣, Southcn.com,. 28 January 2021, https://news.southcn.com/node_c3f70b7ca5/fa9a8ca46a.shtml (accessed 24 April 2022).

[xii] Fergus Ryan, “Jiaflix and 1905 Pictures to Produce $100 million Action-Thriller ‘Speedhunters’,” China Film Insider, 5 April 2017, https://chinafilminsider.com/jiaflix-and-1905-pictures-to-produce-speedhunters/ (accessed 24 December 2021).

[xiii] Patrick Wintour, ‘The eye of the storm’: how 76 Days captured Wuhan’s Covid lockdown up close,” The Guardian, 15 January 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jan/15/the-eye-of-the-storm-how-76-days-captured-wuhans-covid-lockdown-up-close (accessed 23 April 2022)

[xiv] “Interview Photographer Chenzhuo: Celebrity Interview,” CCTV6 China Movie Official Channel, 8 January 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtIAT10Yc1I (accessed 24 April 2022). “Chen Zhuo,” https://www.shashasha.co/en/artist/chen-zhuo (accessed 24 April 2022).

[xv] Matthew Carey, ‘76 Days’ Team On Building Their Covid Film Around Dramatic Wuhan Footage: “So Much Raw Emotional Power” – Contenders TV Docs + Unscripted,” Deadline, 1 May 2021; https://deadline.com/2021/05/76-days-hao-wu-jean-tsien-interview-contenders-tv-1234748388/ (accessed, 24 December 2021)

[xvi] Jung Chang to Bao Feng, Charles Musser and Peter Zhu, Zoom interview, 25 October 2021.