76 DAYS at the Beginning of a Pandemic

Interested in this film? Support local theaters and stream over at AFS@home!

The film 76 DAYS is a raw and empathetic visual document of the COVID-19 outbreak as experienced within the city of Wuhan, China from January 23rd, 2020 to April 8th, 2020. During that time, over 11 million people remained in lockdown while adapting to the unrelenting beginnings of a global pandemic. It feels both tragic and fortunate that this film is available as a consumable cultural artifact while the crisis it portrays rages on.

Watching this film in late 2020 as a United States citizen is a surreal experience. Even with mass inoculation finally on the horizon, the pandemic shows little chance of slowing down in the near future. There have been warnings of a dark winter that will bring about one of the most devastating public health crises in U.S. history. By making a documentary about how medical workers and citizens navigated a finite period of intense suffering while caring for one another as best they could, writer/director duo Hao Wu and Weixi Chen offer something resembling a roadmap for salvaging (and even enriching) our humanity during times of crisis.

The documentary mainly navigates the up-close experiences of medical workers in hospital settings whose bodies and faces are always covered. Because they all look the same, any pre-existing hierarchies and chains of command are flattened. Everyone on screen is simply a caretaker and/or someone trying to survive. In trying to address the varied needs of panicked, suffering patients and their loved ones, these workers end up becoming impromptu door guards, administrative coordinators, grief counselors, and food delivery systems. The film opens with a reminder that these covered faces administering care are human beings, too. As a hospital employee tries to say a final goodbye to their father (a sick patient), they are told that they must stay far away to ensure they are healthy and available for an upcoming afternoon shift. 

Even though the workers shown in the film are mostly faceless and hidden from view, their suffering and exhaustion are palpable. A brief shot of two hospital workers napping on a bench illustrates just how little space they have to recover before their services are demanded once again. 

In one touching scene, a hospital worker tells an elderly patient “Your family is not here, so we are your family now.” They address her as “Grandma” while asking about how she would like to take her meds; this fosters an intimacy that, in this heightened context, feels almost equal to the intimacy between the worker and their dying father in the film’s opening scene. Later in the film, a group of workers comforts a woman about to give birth by saying “Don’t worry, so many of us are here for you” after explaining that it isn’t safe for her to be joined by the father of the child. Profound fear and loneliness are met with radical empathy and compassion.

At one point during the documentary, there is a shot of empty highways in Wuhan that can also be seen in Alex Gibney’s documentary TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL. There are probably only so many recorded images showing what the 76-day lockdown looked like, so it makes sense that the same imagery would appear in multiple films released this year. One particularly interesting aspect of witnessing the same event from these different perspectives is the packaging: While Gibney’s film focuses on what the United States didn’t do in the early days, Wu and Chen spend time depicting the proactive lockdown of an entire city. When loudspeakers in Wuhan warn citizens against spreading misinformation, the message is especially resonant given how destructive that very thing has been over the past several months. 

On April 4th, 2020, a siren in Wuhan acknowledged the dead (a form of collective mourning that could be instructive for the United States). On April 8th, the lockdown was lifted. Within the confines of the film’s runtime, one version of the crisis appears to end. Of course, any viewer will understand the events depicted as just one chapter in a horror that is much more long-term. Even with that knowledge looming as someone watches, the final scenes in 76 DAYS are able to reinforce the beauty that can exist between people looking out for one another. 

There are concluding scenes of people planning long-awaited restaurant trips and family gatherings; parents bringing babies home; and many others beginning to re-enter some recognizable version of their lives with their hope intact. Even in the more grim and logistical aftermath—like the slow, grueling process of returning phones and other possessions left with hospital staff to their rightful owners—there is an unexpected comfort in seeing people at least try to put things back together. In some scenes, people receive their loved ones’ death certificates in addition to their belongings; In these cases, there are tears shed by all parties and a sense of genuine consolation; a medical worker tells a woman “We really tried everything” and the woman believes it. This kind of moment helps the documentary achieve the unexpected: a depiction of true terror as a baseline for reinforcing our collective human potential.