76 Days (2020)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
76 Days will likely leave you with a completely different perspective of COVID-19 and the Coronavirus by revisiting the experiences within four Wuhan hospitals in the early days of the outbreak. A movie hard to let go of once it comes to a close.
An important film, likely one which will be much discussed during awards season and hopefully well beyond.
One of the best films of 2020, a fly-on-the-wall look at the strain on the hospital system during COVID-19, and filmed partly in secret by a co-director who has taken an Anonymous credit out of concern for their involvement.
NO
This may hit too close to home for families who have been impacted by COVID-19.
Though edited with great reverence for the hospital workers and the patients in the film, 76 Days cannot hide from the realities it is depicting and can be a very tough watch at times.
I imagine people can talk their way out of watching a movie like this, even if it has historical significance and relevance.
OUR REVIEW
You can’t hide from the realities put forth in 76 Days, an extraordinary look at Wuhan, China, and the 76 days of lockdown at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Told from the rooms, walls and corridors of an overrun hospital and emergency room in Wuhan, the film serves as an unflinching, tragic, but imperative visual document that COVID-19 is not “just like the flu,” overblown, fabricated, or any other dismissive rhetoric people want to throw at this unrelenting virus.
Outside the hospital walls, banners hang around the city – “Staying Home Makes a Happy Family” reads one, for example. Masks are everywhere, activity is scarce. Within the walls of several different hospitals across Wuhan, directors Weixi Chan, Hao Wu, and a third director credited as Anonymous present a “you are there,” cinema verité look at what nurses, doctors, and medical personnel were witnessing and experiencing day after day, hour after hour.
The thing is: This is not isolated to just 76 days in Wuhan. These scenarios are currently playing out all over again around the world, and certainly in the United States right now – where the pandemic is raging throughout the fall and holiday season and positive case counts, hospitalizations, and death rates are surging for a second (or perhaps third time) in our country.
Back to Wuhan, the stress and strain is apparent from the opening frame.
A nurse, wearing a hazmat suit is distraught and sobbing because her father has succumbed to Coronavirus. The realities are jolting – a nurse, clad from head to toe in a full hazmat suit, could not make it to her father’s bedside in time as she was helping other patients. A wall of coworkers surrounds her and give her space to cry and let out a flood of emotions. But after a few minutes, the work must continue.
“What a tragedy. No one can escape,” shares a nurse sterilizing and disinfecting the personal belongings of a 60-year-old man who has died. His ID card, his key fob - everything gets sprayed and wiped down.
“If he survives this, I’ll thank all of the Gods, I have no other wish,” says a daughter who has lost her mother to COVID-19 and whose father is ailing in the same hospital. Though strong to her family on the phone, she breaks down and turns away from the camera filming her interaction the moment she ends the call.
What 76 Days captures so vividly is the ability for Coronavirus to bring people, institutions, and whatever it encounters down to its knees. COVID-19 exposes every vulnerability in our systems, our protocols and procedures, as well as with our individual psyche.
As of this writing, in early-December 2020, we are learning that vaccines are imminent. As optimistic as that may be, the realities of what this virus has caused during 2020 is immeasurable. The metrics may be jarring and we may be losing almost a 9/11’s count of humans each day in the United States, but the psychological impacts and cultural shifts Coronavirus has caused will be felt for decades to come.
Edited meticulously by Wu, the film is not only full of stark subject matter, but there are hints of joy and some sense of normalcy. As viewers, we find these moments in the maternity ward with babies born healthy and mothers able to make that first connection to their newborn child. Some patients recover and are cheered as they depart the hospital. The moments shared between medical personnel and patients proves moving and unforgettable. Optimism arrives with news that Wuhan is lifting its lockdown.
A couple stories emerge which the filmmakers return to throughout the film. A couple celebrates the birth of their first child. An elderly man, known as “Grandpa,” wanders around the hospital and continues to get redirected back to his room.
But to tell this story is to know that a storm cloud hangs over all of this. Inadvertently lost in the presentation of this film is that the footage we are watching took place this year.
MTV Documentary Films is distributing 76 Days and the film is a potent, powerful record of the first days of an experience that has redefined history. The triad of directors have delivered both a macro- and micro-level view of what millions have experienced through this entire ordeal.
As we see empty hangers where extra scrubs are typically kept, the cataloguing of death certificates, phone calls by nurses to loved ones waiting for updates, or the small joys that come in people successfully going home to further quarantine, 76 Days reminds us that Wuhan was merely the beginning of a year-long nightmare that likely will become worse again before we begin to see a collective daylight wash over us once again.
CAST & CREW
Documentary.
Director: Weixi Chan, Hao Wu, Anonymous
Written by: Hao Wu
Release Date: December 4, 2020
MTV Documentary Films