Nanfu Wang’s Brave COVID Doc Draws Dramatic Parallels
In The Same Breath Director Nanfu Wang learns the film has won a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award.
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“Freedom of speech doesn't necessarily mean that there is a closer access to truth, or people have free access to information. It just means that information, misinformation, disinformation spread freely, too.”
--- director and producer Nanfu Wang
In January 2020, Nanfu Wang was celebrating the New Year with her family, just a few hundred miles from Wuhan, China. What she didn’t know then was that a deadly virus was ravaging Wuhan, their hospitals were filling to capacity, and the Chinese government was silencing doctors who spoke up about the impending public health catastrophe.
Wang caught on to the truth through Chinese citizen’s brave social media posts revealing the dire situation. That’s when she decided to direct and produce the 2022 duPont-Columbia award-winning documentary, In the Same Breath.
In this episode of the On Assignment podcast, Wang tells the J-School’s Prizes Department Executive Director Abi Wright and duPont Awards Director Lisa R. Cohen about the genesis of the film, the danger and complexity of shooting a documentary during a pandemic in an authoritarian country, and the incredible parallels she found between disinformation in China and the U.S. during the COVID-19 crisis.
Wang discussed the difficulties of remotely recruiting a team of ten videographers, mostly strangers to her, who were willing to risk everything to expose the truth of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan – where there are harsh punishments for political speech.
“It's a very tricky conversation,” Wang said of her phone calls with the Chinese videographers in the early stages of the filmmaking. “I need to gauge whether I could trust this stranger who would not, after talking on the phone, go to the government.”
In addition to her concern about the delicate trust and safety of her crew, Wang told the duPonts that she also worried about her family. The government threatened them with punishment in retaliation for Wang’s journalistic work.
“They said if I were ever going to make another film again about China, they would arrest my family,” Wang said in the interview.
Wang weaves together the outcomes of suppressed free speech in China – prolific disinformation and misinformation – with the disinformation spreading within the U.S. In the episode, Wang details how this paradoxical situation, in which freedom of speech in the U.S. and suppressed speech in China both promulgated dangerous disinformation – served as the driving question behind her documentary.
Watch In the Same Breath on Hulu or HBO.