Nanfu Wang’s gripping new documentary In the Same Breath, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, opens on the 2019 New Year’s Eve in Wuhan, China, site of the first cases of the novel coronavirus. It may be an interesting (and fateful) coincidence that the filmmaker was a Sundance Film Festival juror in Park City on January 23, 2020, the same day Wuhan went into lockdown during the first COVID-19 outbreak.

In the Same Breath offers a reminder of the then unknown lethal virus and its horrible consequences, both in the short term and in the long term, during the ensuing year. This is the Chinese American director’s follow-up to her 2019 Sundance grand jury prize-winner One Child Nation, co-helmed with Jialing Zhang, about the fallout of China’s one-child policy that lasted for over three decades, from 1979 to 2015.    

The new documentary is an even more pertinent feature as it tries to understand the full nature and scope of the crisis that at first seemed local before becoming global. It relies on televised news, social media, video diaries, beginning in China and then progressing to the US, to chronicle the onset of the pandemic, especially the misunderstanding, ignorance, and sometimes refusal to believe the virus’s potential and real risks by both politicians and the lay public at large. 

Wang’s main focus is the willful misinformation and fake news that contributed in their own dangerous ways to the loss of life of millions all over the world. The tale begins with what could be described an irony. On New Year’s Day 2020, shown in tandem with General Secretary Xi Jinping’s optimistic public address, a news bulletin reports that eight people were arrested for spreading ‘false rumors’ about a mysterious and unknown pneumonia (possibly a variant of flu?).

As January 2020 unfolds, beds at local hospitals start to overfill, but the state brass are still unwilling to acknowledge and assess any health crisis. Echoing the early U.S. response, particularly the Trump administration, Wang discloses how the Chinese authorities deliberately promoted false information, suggesting that all was well, that there was no reason for public concern, let alone collective panic.

Of course, the manipulative propaganda also aimed to promote national unity, deflecting attention from the particular region where the problem began. To that extent, the director intersperses into the serious proceedings some entertaining elements, such as kitschy and colorful performances of communist anthems and ceremonial dance numbers. 

Wang’s fearlessness is remarkable considering the personal risks involved in such disclosures. As a Chinese expatriate, she makes annual family trips to the Jiangxi province, While she’s not resisting authority, like the journalists whose research is used in the film, she is still daring to baldly criticize a country where free speech of expression is forbidden.

Her own first-person voice-over reveals the pain of a woman who feels forced to speak out unapologetically against the regime and the country in which she grew up. But her residence in the U.S. also offers advantages, enabling her to use the fresh perspective of an outsider who was an insider.

While realizing that America is a liberal society, with strong democratic traditions of freedom of expression and organization, she also sees unfortunate similarities between the American climate of ideas and the censorious atmosphere prevalent in China. The film displays the Trump administration’s chillingly indifferent reaction to the virus, and then the insane and irrational conspiracy theories that his views have empowered (leading all the way to the insurrection on Capitol Hill on January 6 of this year).

Even nurses and doctors interviewed by Wang in New York and New Jersey (where she resides) admit to how ill-prepared America was for the first wave of the virus, back in February and March. Some of them report how masks were purposefully not circulated among the general public, at least in the pandemic’s initial stages. 

With travel not an option now, she is forced to rely on anonymous volunteers in China to gather observational footage, interviews, and drone-establishing shots. While a juror at Sundance, Wang was coordinating various crews, one in the ICU room, another in the ambulance that followed first responders rushing to patients, and still another recording ordinary people in their quarantined homes.

However, despite the aforementioned obstacles, largely stemming from the remote construction of the film’s contents, Wang’s personal perspective on the subject comes across so clearly and vividly, suggesting that the pandemic is as much of a battle between citizens and their representative lawmakers, as a larger battle of humanity against an ever-mutating virus.

In the Same Breath is a most suitable companion piece to another urgent documentary 76 Days, about the infancy of COVID-19 in China. It’s impossible to watch this feature about the corrupt Chinese administration without remembering the increased ineptitude and disastrous handling of the lethal pandemic for the duration of the Trump regime, especially over the past three months, when the country witnessed a resurgence of cases.