76 Days covers the hectic period of the lock down in Wuhan at the start of the COVID-19 virus. The main focus is on the hospital workers who are covered from head to toe in PPE, completely unrecognizable to each other except for their I.D.'s and grab any opportunity to sit and have a moment of stillness. The film opens with one of the staff arriving at the room of her father just after he has passed. She is physically restrained by her colleagues as she expresses her uncontrollable grief. She just wants to say goodbye but is not allowed to do so as words of encouragement are sent her way for her to be strong as her long shift has just started.
Director Hao Wu put the film together from New York while Weixi Chen and an Anonymous contributor shot the footage guerilla-style in Wuhan. The pair would upload their footage to the cloud where Hao Wu would go to retrieve finding the best threads to begin to piece together a film. The results are poignant yet devastating from the uncontrollable opening sequence to the end when the lockdown is finally lifted.
The project tracks a patient referred to by staff as Grandpa throughout the film. He is restless, does not wear his mask properly, and is constantly wandering throughout the hospital especially at night trying to get out and go home. From this personal and measurably happy tail, the embedded filmmakers train a lens to the entrance of the facility. The doors are locked and there is banging and shouting in the small space between the doors and the elevators. The area is full of infected people trying to get in for treatment. The hospital can handle 50 maximum slowly working their way through a selection process a few patients at a time. Another morbid task is making calls to the family of the deceased as the nurse on duty goes through personal belongings including cell phones, I.D. cards, and jewellery that the staff remove from the dead feeling the family would want to keep as a souvenir.
The directors did not want any of the staff to be identified in reviews of the film for fear of potential backlash from the Chinese Government. The film is shot in four different hospitals with the name of one being prominently displayed towards the end of the film. The spirit of the community is something to behold. Volunteers come from all over the country to help out. Citizens turn their vehicles into transports for the infected sanitizing the best they can and decontaminating after each trip.
On top of it all the project originally set for a U.S. network to was eventually scrapped once the virus found its way to U.S. shores. Hao Wu continued to edit during the down period later convincing his two collaborators a world away to keep going as this was an important project that people should see.
76 Days is a close-up view of medical workers working with the unknown. The lessons learned that are being applied to the second wave that is now sweeping the globe were unknown to these virus battling pioneers. They manage to have some tender moments when they show their kindness by blowing up plastic gloves to create get well soon balloons placed amongst the tubes of a ventilator. They are the only people that these suffering manly seniors see in an isolated setting with a good possibility that their patients lives could be coming to an end.
**** Out of 4
76 Days | Hao Wu/ Weixi Chen/Anonymous | U.S.A. | 2020 | 93 Minutes.
Tags: Wuhan , China, COVID-19, Lockdown, Pandemic, PPE, Guerilla Filmmaking, Ventilator, ID Card, Smartphone, Facetime, Bracelet.
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