As a documentary filmmaker, Hao Wu has focused throughout his career on smaller, character-driven stories that bridge the divide between his native China, where he grew up, and his adoptive home in America. In 2013's "People's Republic of Desire," for example, Wu followed three young Chinese people as they pursued internet fame through live-streaming, while his 2019 Netflix film "All in My Family" chronicled his tradition-minded parents' road to accepting his homosexuality.
When he was first approached in February about making a film about the growing COVID-19 pandemic, Wu wasn't sure how to approach such an enormous, headline-dominating subject. "Normally I tend to shy away from newsy topics," he says. "As a filmmaker, I don't know what more I could add to a topic that's being well covered by the news media already."
Based in New York, where he lives with his partner and their two children, Wu began reaching out to reporters and filmmakers on the ground in Wuhan to find out what they'd been seeing. Poring through footage from overrun hospitals where health care workers heroically struggled to save as many lives as they could, and reflecting on his own family back in China — including a dying grandfather he was unable to visit due to travel restrictions — Wu quickly realized that even this massive, globe-shaking story ultimately boiled down to the sort of intimate human drama that had always fascinated him.
The resulting film, "76 Days," offers an alternately harrowing and inspiring look inside four hospitals in Wuhan during the country's two-and-a-half-month lockdown as it became the world's first COVID-19 epicenter. Co-directed by Wu and two Chinese filmmakers — Weixi Chen and a state-run-media reporter who is remaining anonymous so as not to run afoul of the government — the film premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be released Friday in more than 50 virtual cinemas nationwide.
Dispensing with interviews with experts and commentators, "76 Days" instead zeroes in on a handful of individuals as they navigate the crisis, including a health care worker comforting an old woman who is dying alone, a young couple who have been separated from their newborn baby and a weary nurse returning the cellphones of deceased patients to their grieving families.
The LA Times spoke with Wu about how the film came together, what it reveals about China's handling of the pandemic and the messages he hopes viewers take away from it.
