Ai Wewei talks about covid in Wuhan

The gray sky weighs like a lid on the deserted Wuhan station revealed by an aerial shot. Nothing moves, the universe is purged of its colors, the streets emptied of their inhabitants. The only sign of life, the light of a few ambulances in front of a hospital. And we say to ourselves with horror that a documentary from 2021 looks furiously like the science fiction films of the 20th century...

In 2017, Ai Weiwei released a first documentary, Human Flow, devoted to migratory flows. This certainly meritorious film suffered from a handicap: the presence of its author. The Chinese artist puts himself on stage when he should hide behind his subject and this touch of presumptuousness causes a certain uneasiness. His second foray into the cinema turns out to be otherwise sharp and of an irreproachable objectivity since the director has only organized from his European asylum the raw material he had requested in China.

Also read:“Human Flow”: 65 million refugees, and Ai Weiwei

Coronation, or “coronation” in English, contracts two words, “coronavirus”, and “nation”, to tell the emergence of the virus in China. Appeared on December 1, 2019 in Wuhan, reported on December 31, SARS-CoV-2 imposed containment in Wuhan on January 23, 2020 – then spread throughout the world. Ai Weiwei asks twelve inhabitants of the closed city to film their daily life. From some 500 hours of rushes, it draws the material for a health thriller coupled with a humanist manifesto.

Rotten Carps

The first sequence follows a journey home after a long isolation on a deserted highway covered in snow. At service stations, police checks are as regular as they are meticulous, but humor retains its rights: the infrared temperature gun has misfired (34.2°, that's not a lot...), the attendant ends up by turning the weapon against itself to check its operation. When the motorist returns home, he discovers that his fish did not survive his absence. Putrefied carp in glaucous water quite rightly symbolize the state of mind of a humanity cut off from its freedom of movement.

The Chinese have succeeded in stopping the proliferation of the virus, but at what cost? By locking people up, imposing a form of martial law, multiplying precautions to the point of paranoia... It is with a fire hose that hydroalcoholic solutions are administered. On people, garbage cans, gardens and even in the air – a tank truck spits the hydrogel by hectolitres...

The nursing staff disinfects their ears, cheeks and eyebrows for a long time before removing the mask. Doctors wear double masks and visors, put on two or three superimposed airtight suits. They are under video surveillance when they change in three successive decontamination rooms so as not to fail in any way with a maniacal protocol.

Maoist grandmother

Sanitary measures cause unexpected victims, like this worker who came to work on a construction site in Wuhan and who finds himself stuck, condemned to live in his car at the bottom of an underground car park while waiting for a hypothetical authorization to circulate. A grandmother, Maoist once Maoist always, reiterates her unwavering commitment to the Communist Party, reminds us that it is by working together that we can move mountains. However, her enthusiasm seems to have stalled when she realizes that you have to have a smartphone to get on a bus and that the authorities charge for isolation... The pandemic definitively invalidates the proverb that "The praying mantis can stop a cart ". The individual, this insect, is nothing compared to the chariot of the State.

The good days are coming back. Wuhan is off the hook, the virus locally defeated. But the ordeal caused deaths and left indelible traces. We are witnessing other headaches with the bureaucracy to recover the ashes of the deceased - crushed jute bag, crushed by hand to enter the urn... A young woman recalls that "the shadow of this pandemic will darken our hearts forever.

To see on the FIFDH website. "China and the pandemic": Saturday March 13 at 7 p.m., the festival offers, in collaboration with "Le Temps", a videoconference by Ai Weiwei.