76 Days | Little White Lies

76 Days

15 Jan 2021 / Released: 22 Jan 2021

Words by Weiting Liu

Directed by Hao Wu, and Weixi Chen

Healthcare worker in protective suit attending to a patient on a hospital bed.
Healthcare worker in protective suit attending to a patient on a hospital bed.
4

Anticipation.

An underground Chinese documentary tracing Covid’s origins.

4

Enjoyment.

A touching, timely tribute to the human stories at the heart of the pandemic.

4

In Retrospect.

A vital film of historical significance.

This inti­mate doc­u­men­tary, shot dur­ing lock­down in Wuhan, mea­sures the human cost of the coro­n­avirus pandemic.

Hao Wu and Weixi Chen’s affect­ing doc­u­men­tary 76 Days was filmed in local hos­pi­tals at the epi­cen­tre of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic while Wuhan was still under city­wide lock­down. It opens with a vis­cer­al sequence pieced togeth­er from var­i­ous hand­held track­ing shots. These shots shak­i­ly cap­ture the out­pour­ing of an ICU nurse’s grief as she strug­gles to cope with the grim news that her father has just died of Covid in the same hospital.

From the out­set, the film encap­su­lates the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and com­pul­so­ry strength that front­line work­ers have dis­played while com­bat­ing the onset of China’s Covid out­break. Pay­ing the utmost respect to their sub­jects, the direc­tors adopt an obser­va­tion­al approach in order to gath­er raw footage of the heart-wrench­ing and some­times empow­er­ing moments shared between med­ical staff and their patients. It’s a film of lament, bond­ing, respon­si­bil­i­ty and rebirth.

Inci­sive­ly inter­cut into these human nar­ra­tives, visu­al sig­ni­fiers high­light the intrin­sic dual­i­ty of hope and ele­gy: per­son­alised doo­dles drawn by med­ical work­ers on haz­mat suits to cheer each oth­er up; a get-well-soon bal­loon’ made out of a rub­ber glove, tucked beside the ECMO tubes attached to an uncon­scious grand­ma; pho­to IDs, death cer­tifi­cates and phone screens of the deceased, all sani­tised and organ­ised for their fam­i­lies’ retrieval. Such images of inan­i­mate objects bring home the fact that these are real peo­ple – not num­bers or sta­tis­tics on a chart.

With­in the hos­pi­tals’ high-pres­sure set­ting – enclosed with­in the air­tight vac­u­um of a locked down city – a few vibrant, uplift­ing arcs come to the fore: a grand­fa­ther with demen­tia who tries to escape from the hos­pi­tal but ends up becom­ing attached to his atten­tive care­tak­ers and refus­es to be dis­charged; a patient sep­a­rat­ed from her hus­band and new­born daugh­ter who is even­tu­al­ly reunit­ed, start­ing a new chap­ter of her life. Fol­low­ing the through­lines of these indi­vid­u­als’ tri­umphs over the virus, we also glimpse their nor­mal life out­side of their quar­an­tined hospitalisation.

There is no obvi­ous polit­i­cal agen­da here. It is evi­dent that Wu and Chen did not set out to uncov­er the ear­ly state actions (or the lack there­of) which failed to stop the spread of the nov­el virus, paving the way for a glob­al cri­sis. Rather, their film is an empa­thet­ic, emo­tion­al demon­stra­tion of ordi­nary Chi­nese people’s extra­or­di­nary resilience and opti­mism. It reminds us why we all should salute the vic­tims, fight­ers and sur­vivors around the world.

76 Days is avail­able to watch via Dog­woof from 22 January.

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