Ai Weiwei has made a sobering pandemic… | Little White Lies

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Ai Wei­wei has made a sober­ing pan­dem­ic doc­u­men­tary in secrecy

24 Aug 2020

Words by Charles Bramesco

Emergency services worker in protective gear next to ambulance van
Emergency services worker in protective gear next to ambulance van
The Chi­nese artist-filmmaker’s gor­geous, shat­ter­ing Coro­Na­tion qui­et­ly arrived online over the weekend.

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 Bays impend­ing COVID movie.

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

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