'76 days': All you need to know about the haunting COVID documentary

76 Days is the first full-length documentary based on the Coronavirus outbreak. It had its first world premiere at the ongoing Toronto Internation Film Festival in Canada. The documentary's plot majorly focuses on the struggles of the frontline workers in the initial days of the pandemic. Here is all you need to know about the first coronavirus documentary, 76 Days.

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'76 Days' at TIFF

76 Days is a full-length 93-minute documentary film directed by Hao Wu, who is a Chinese-American writer, director, editor, and documentarian, along with his two co-directors from Wuhan. Weixi Chen, the co-director, is a video reporter for Esquire China. The third director has been kept anonymous. The documentary majorly captures the struggles and panics of the patients and the frontline workers that worked day and night during the initial days of the coronavirus outbreak. 

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The documentary covers the time period in Wuhan, China between January 23 to April 8 when the city was placed under lockdown. The filmmakers of the documentary had requested the first viewers of TIFF to refrain from discussing any details of the film so as to avoid any Government interference in the film before its big premiere. In an interview with TIFF, Hao Wu, the co-director of the film, mentioned that he had visited China for the Chinese New Year and when he came back to the US, he immediately contacted the two reporter-filmmakers from China after seeing the early conditions of the outbreak. The reporters risked their lives to capture the reality of the pandemic. 

Source: Still from 76 days

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76 Days cast majorly involves the hospital workers dressed in PPE's and goggles. The cast also includes tons of patients who are battling the virus. The documentary begins with a woman crying and begging to see her dead father’s corpse one last time. And it shows a box in which ID cards and phones of the dead are placed. The film shows how hospital workers are running from one place to another to attend all the patients. At the door, one can see loads of people struggling to enter the hospitals and the overwhelmed workers making them enter one by one to maintain the distance. 

Source: Still from 76 days

'76 Days' Review

Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s artistic director, described the documentary as “urgent, powerful filmmaking”. The Guardian reviewed 76 Days and said, "it’s a potent human-interest story and a portrait of a city under siege". David Ehrlich, IndieWire's Senior Film Critic said, ''76 Days' is an urgent act of witnessing for a world that only tends to see itself clearly in hindsight''.

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