By Tom and Marilyn Jozwik
HE: “76 Days” serves to document the January 23-April 8, 2020, lockdown of Wuhan, the Chinese city of 11 million, as the coronavirus pandemic began. The 1 ½-hour documentary film is now available on virtual cinema.
SHE: Before seeing the opening moments of “76 Days” I pictured Wuhan, China, as being a rural village. Instead, what I saw was a big city with sparkling high-rise buildings and a beautiful gleaming bridge spanning the Yangtze River. The insides of the four hospitals shown reflected the same modern feel. The film’s directors, including New York’s Hao Wu, tell this story through nurses, doctors, patients and their families, in real time as they deal with the early days of COVID-19.
HE: I don’t believe I’d ever even heard of Wuhan before the 76-day period this movie depicts. Unlike many other documentaries, this one does without a narrator. There is plenty of conversation. But no narration as such. Factual information is displayed onscreen from time to time, along with subtitles; these and the pictures tell the tale. There is no music. All of the above somehow gives the production a heightened realism.
SHE: Indeed. The axiom “One picture is worth 1,000 words” is apt here. In the early days we see would-be patients banging on a hospital door as hospital staff scrambles to find beds (“Too much chaos,” somebody comments). All staff are covered in bulky, protective gear that audibly swooshes as they scurry down hallways. Staff is upbeat in the midst of it, drawing slogans and pictures on the backs of co-workers’ gowns even as death surrounds them. There are moments of joy—as when a COVID mother gives birth by C-section to a beautiful girl (but must quarantine for two weeks before seeing her again). There is the staffer who must call family members to pick up the belongings of their late loved ones. “76 Days” is a story told with humanity and compassion.
Grade: A-
HE: We witness the humanity and compassion of which you speak as we become acquainted with the new and quarantined parents you’ve mentioned and their daughter, affectionately compared to a penguin by parents and nurses alike. There is also the happy vignette of a cooperative, beloved—and eventually released—senior patient and the not-so-happy one of his polar opposite, an elderly dementia sufferer who hopes against hope to escape his perceived hospital prison. Additional focus on these three segments would’ve narrowed the fuller (if more generalized) picture presented here, but might’ve made for a more relatable, and ultimately more memorable, piece of cinema.
Grade: B+