Ai Wei­wei has made a sober­ing pan­dem­ic doc­u­men­tary in secrecy

The great mul­ti­me­dia artist and human rights defend­er Ai Wei­wei has not been sit­ting idly by while the world has descend­ed into pan­dem­ic-fueled dis­ar­ray. Though he’s been unable to leave his cur­rent res­i­dence in Europe, he nonethe­less direct­ed a new doc­u­men­tary titled Coro­Na­tion about the cat­a­clysmic sit­u­a­tion in Wuhan and the sur­round­ing regions of Chi­na, where the COVID-19 virus has hit pop­u­la­tions the hardest.

Employ­ing a team of civil­ian cam­era oper­a­tors on-site, Ai exam­ines the dev­as­ta­tion and recon­struc­tion in the wake of this sweep­ing cri­sis through a patch­work cast of ordi­nary cit­i­zens. A cou­ple on the road goes through meters of red tape to return home; a con­struc­tion work­er has a more dif­fi­cult time, barred from his own town as well as his pre­vi­ous work site in Wuhan; an old­er woman and her son debate the media’s role in the pub­lic health response; a couri­er brings emer­gency sup­plies to those in need.

In the mes­mer­iz­ing long takes for which Ai’s cin­e­ma work is known, we snake around the end­less cor­ri­dors of tem­po­rary hos­pi­tal facil­i­ties and float over expans­es of ruin. The film touts itself as the first fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary about a glob­al dis­as­ter not even yet fin­ished, and it does bring a sense of imme­di­a­cy to its depic­tion of the des­per­a­tion and tedi­um defin­ing the cur­rent moment.

Ai being a staunch crit­ic of the Chi­nese state, it comes as no sur­prise that the film assumes a sociopo­lit­i­cal dimen­sion to go with its you-are-there reportage. He tac­it­ly illus­trates how the government’s cen­tral­iz­ing of pow­er enabled it to enact swift and bru­tal­ly effi­cient coun­ter­mea­sures to con­tain the coro­n­avirus threat, though at the cost of many indi­vid­u­als’ per­son­al lib­er­ty and agency.

It seems that everyone’s rac­ing to com­plete some project address­ing our shared, unend­ing night­mare, but Ai’s the first to do the sub­ject jus­tice. With appro­pri­ate solem­ni­ty and com­pas­sion, he artic­u­lates just how much is at stake, both on the micro and macro lev­els. One can only hope we’ll see this same sen­si­tiv­i­ty and cir­cum­spec­tion from Michael Bay​‘s impend­ing COVID movie.

Coro­Na­tion is avail­able to stream now on Vimeo in the UK or the Alamo Draft­house Vir­tu­al Cin­e­ma in the US.