“Rich or poor, nobody can escape. What a tragedy.” MTV Documentary Films has released an official US trailer for 76 Days, a chilling fly-on-the-wall documentary capturing the first 76 days during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in China. Raw and intimate, this documentary captures the struggles of patients and frontline medical professionals battling the vicious COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan. It focuses primarily on the many hospital workers and the endless patients in Wuhan, where the virus originated, earlier this year before it began to spread around the world. Filmmaker Hao Wu had to setup an intricate system to collect footage – another filmmaker named Weixi Chen and an uncredited “anonymous” contributor would secretly send him their footage from Wuhan. This just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and is being released virtually by MTV (!) this month. It’s a harrowing and heart-wrenching look at how devastating this virus is.
Here’s the official trailer (+ poster) for Weixi Chen & Hao Wu’s doc 76 Days, direct from MTV’s YouTube:
On January 23rd, 2020, China locked down Wuhan, a city of 11 million, to combat the emerging COVID-19 outbreak. Set in four hospitals, ’76 DAYS’ tells indelible human stories at the center of this pandemic—from a woman begging in vain to bid a final farewell to her father, a grandfather with dementia searching for his way home, a couple anxious to meet their newborn, to a nurse determined to return personal items to families of the deceased. These intimate stories bear witness to the death and rebirth of a city under a 76-day lockdown, and to the compassion and human resilience that persists in times of profound tragedy. 76 Days is co-directed by Chinese filmmakers Weixi Chen & Hao Wu (director of the docs Beijing or Bust, The Road to Fame, People’s Republic of Desire previosuly) & Anonymous (unlisted for safety & security reasons). This originally premiered at the Toronto and Zurich Film Festivals this year. MTV Doc Films will debut Chen & Wu’s 76 Days doc in “virtual cinemas” in the US starting December 4th, 2020 this month.
