In Ai Weiwei’s “Coronation,” an intensive care unit team consults at a hospital in Wuhan, China.
LONDON – In January of this year, Wuhan, China, became the first city in the world to impose a lockdown to combat a neo-coronavirus pandemic. In many ways, this critical period remains a mystery, and few images have escaped the censors.
A new film by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei fills in some of that missing history. Though now living in Europe, he remotely guided dozens of volunteers from across China to create Coronation, a film that depicts the harsh blockade of Wuhan and a country that was able to mobilize enormous resources at great human cost.
“The audience must understand that this is about China,” Ai Weiwei said in a phone interview from Portugal. “Yes, it’s about the neo-crown virus blockade, but it’s reflecting the experience of ordinary Chinese people.”
Despite some early missteps, China has done a better job than many other countries in containing the epidemic, with 4,700 deaths in China compared with more than 172,000 in the United States. The Chinese Communist Party has done its best to suppress expressions of grief and anger, but its efforts still enjoy widespread support in the country.
The film tells the larger story through chronological vignettes, beginning with a couple driving back to their home in the Wuhan suburbs on a snowy night on January 23rd and ending with people burning traditional paper money offerings on a street corner on April 8th.
The scenes and stories are remarkable for their rare entry into the Chinese state apparatus. They include close-up footage of hospitals and intensive care units built in a matter of days, scenes of medical staff being honored for their induction into the Communist Party, and crematorium workers pressing bags of ashes for placement in urns.
The overall impression of the film is one of awe-inspiring efficiency, especially in the first half hour. The crew quickly bolts the prefabricated rooms together and the machines in the ICU beep. New members raise their right fists to take the oath of membership, and the crematorium workers are so overworked that they complain that their hands hurt.
As the film progresses, the human cost becomes more and more apparent. Volunteers are not allowed to leave the quarantine area at the end of their work and have to sleep in their cars in the garage. Mourners wail at the crematorium, and one man fights to collect his father’s urn without the presence of government officials – something authorities won’t allow because they fear mourning will turn into anger at the government for allowing the virus to get out of hand.
Ai Weiwei is best known for his large-scale installations as an artist, but he often investigates sensitive issues in China through his films, including a documentary about a man who killed six police officers in Shanghai and a documentary about why so many schools collapsed in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.
“I have a team that can get started quickly,” Ai Weiwei said of Coronation. “They don’t have to ask me what I want.”
Ai Weiwei says that in addition to volunteers and paid staff, he also has the help of his partner, Wang Fen. Wang Fen has siblings living in Wuhan. “She’s very emotionally invested,” he says.
Ai Weiwei said the most difficult shots were taken inside the intensive care unit, but he could not disclose how they were filmed. Most of the shots were done with smartphone-sized handheld cameras that stabilize the images, he said. It helped that many people wore masks, he said: it made them feel less nervous, because talking to the camera can be tricky.
Ai Weiwei said he collected nearly 500 hours of footage, which he and his team trimmed down to make the roughly two-hour documentary.
The film is available in the U.S. on Alamo On Demand and elsewhere on Vimeo On Demand. Ai Weiwei said he had hoped to screen the film at film festivals first, but festivals in New York, Toronto and Venice all turned him down after initially expressing interest. Amazon and Netflix also rejected the film, he said.
He said he got the impression that it was because many festivals and companies wanted to do business in China and so tried to avoid topics that might anger Beijing, which some other Chinese directors said was common.
The Venice International Film Festival declined to comment, and the Toronto Independent Film Festival and Amazon did not return phone calls or emails. Other institutions deny that politics played a role. A spokesman for Nefly said the company is producing its own documentary about the new coronavirus, and a press officer for the New York Film Festival said in an e-mail, “We want to emphasize that political pressure is not – and has never been – a factor in the development of the film. -played a role in the curatorial choices of the festival.”
According to Ai Weiwei, the film shows that the success of Chinese technocrats poses a great challenge to open societies. Chinese state capitalism has led to decades of rapid economic growth and helped lift tens of millions of people out of absolute poverty.
“But it’s not just the efficiency of your decisions that matters, but also what you can bring to human society,” Ai Weiwei said. “China doesn’t have the answer to that.”
He said China’s epidemic preparedness reveals an increasingly stressed and fragile state that does not provide a model of governance for the world. For example, in the scene where mourners collect ashes, Ai Weiwei said viewers should note that all the people in the background, dressed in white suits and full personal protective equipment, are members of the state apparatus trying to ensure that grief is kept under wraps.
“China has a very clear view that once it gets out of control, chaos will follow,” Ai Weiwei said. “It doesn’t have a base that can stabilize itself because it doesn’t have NGOs, only the government.”
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