Documentarian Nanfu Wang’s latest film, “In The Same Breath,” which premieres Wednesday on HBO Max, had quite a rapid turnaround. Depicting the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January. But it’s no less thoughtful, carefully constructed and inquisitively insightful than any of Wang’s other films, an approach that has become her hallmark in a career that’s been marked by one remarkable film after the next.
Wang, who was born and raised in southeast China's Jiangxi province, was educated in the U.S. at Ohio University and New York University. Her work has consistently probed at the oppressive Chinese government through an intimate and human perspective, and “In the Same Breath” turns its lens on how that manifested during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically focusing on the messaging and information, and sometimes misinformation, presented by the state-run news media.
While the Chinese media attempted to downplay the severity of the pandemic early on, including obfuscating the number of deaths, as well as presenting rosy human interest stories about how well doctors were fighting the deadly disease, Wang, who was visiting her mother in China in January 2020 as the pandemic began, sent cameras into the hospitals to capture what was happening on the ground. She contrasts her footage and interviews of grieving families with the propaganda presented in the news media. She then juxtaposes the highly controlled Chinese media landscape, where freedom of speech is forbidden and citizen journalists arrested, with the anti-lockdown protests in the U.S. and viral misinformation spread via social media, where perhaps freedom of speech ultimately led to more misinformation and mistrust. Ultimately, she imagines a world where the pandemic was taken seriously and governments transparently shared information, though that reality will never be an option at this point.
It’s a fascinating and sophisticated latest entry in her oeuvre, posing important questions and helping us to unpack the unseen and seen before our eyes, which she has done again and again in her work, which includes some of the best nonfiction films of the past five years.
Her debut film, “Hooligan Sparrow” has similarities to “In the Same Breath,” focusing on the oppression of the Chinese government on free speech, this time with regard to women’s rights activist Ye Haiyan, who has faced incredible persecution and violence for her protests against child sex abuse. In “Hooligan Sparrow,” Wang herself, who is often a part of her films, struggles to even capture these events for fear of violence and intimidation, and depicts the harrowing process of getting her footage out of China. Watch it on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy, or rent it for $3.99 on iTunes.
Wang followed it up with a film set in the U.S., “I am Another You,” a sensitively realized portrait of a young homeless man, Dylan, who has chosen the transient life in Florida, far from his middle-class upbringing in Utah. The film is a true participant observation, with Wang joining Dylan on the streets to understand his chosen lifestyle. Imbued with her signature rough-hewn beauty and told with her voice-over, it’s a deeply humane look at the homelessness crisis here. Watch it on Kanopy, AMC TV+ or rent it for $2.99 on Amazon.
Wang’s Emmy-nominated 2019 film “One Child Nation,” co-directed with Jialing Zhang, returned to China to unpack the one child policy that existed from 1975-2015. Wang again applies her personal lens to the story, having been born under this policy and further inspired to explore the effects and dark side of it after becoming pregnant with her son. Wang and Zhang inspect the propaganda around this policy and ultimately uncover the human rights violations that it engendered, examining its traumatic after-effects. Stream it on Amazon Prime.
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