The award-winning director of “One Child Nation” and “Hooligan Sparrow” takes on the COVID-19 crisis with “In the Same Breath.” Nanfu Wang’s latest explores how China and the United States responded to the pandemic in its early days. “It’s hard to picture how all of this might end, but I can clearly imagine how this could have begun differently,” Wang says in a new trailer for the Sundance doc.
The spot kicks off with Wang returning to her hometown in China to celebrate Chinese New Year — the last time she remembers feeling any semblance of normalcy. The filmmaker returned to the U.S. just as the media first started addressing the coronavirus. “The official news reports said that everything was under control,” she emphasizes. We see clips of a Chinese journalists suggesting that “there’s no clear evidence of human to human transmission” and American journalists stressing that “the risk remains low.”
In reality, hospitals in China were overwhelmed. “I remember the day of the lockdown, we received 14,000 calls,” a healthcare worker reveals. Another adds, “It felt like hell on Earth.”
Described as a “revelatory illustration of the devastating toll that resulted from official missteps at containment of the infection and the widespread phenomenon of social media misinformation, while also highlighting the strength and resilience of the people who risked everything to communicate the truth,” “In the Same Breath” is set to debut on HBO August 18 at 9 p.m. ET/PT and will be available to stream on HBO Max.
