In the Same Breath movie review (2021)

Her film opens simply, joyfully, in fact: Wuhan, China is celebrating the New Year. Jubilant crowds fill the streets. Their celebratory balloons float through the vast, neon canyon of the modern skyline. The next day President Xi Jinping commemorates the country’s “prosperous society.” On that same day, a bulletin streams on daily news: “Eight people were punished for spreading rumors about an unknown pneumonia.” The seemingly minor reporting, as we now know, will take on greater import. And from the vantage of August 2021, it’s impossible to look at the throngs of people, unmasked, enjoying their last hours of normalcy without an odd blend of wistfulness and fright.  

Since its premiere at Sundance 2021 in January, when the development of vaccines sprung new hope, the interminable cycle of mistakes made by those combating the Delta variant has only added new contours to Wang’s sharp work. Similar to “One Child Nation,” the Chinese-American director attaches a personal lens to her studies. Wang and her two-year-old son were visiting her mother in China for New Year’s. The public’s awareness of the virus, at the time, was nil. Upon returning to the United States for business, Wuhan went into lockdown, catching Wang, who left her son with her mother in China, by surprise. Though she would eventually bring her son back to America, the event spurred her instinct for truth finding. 

At its core, Wang’s film concerns how governments consolidate greater power by crafting narratives out of tragedy. She begins by parsing China’s actions, how the state-run media shaped the story to downplay the severity of the problem while selling a pro-regime message of positivity. In one startling sequence, a Brady Bunch array of news anchors repeat, word-for-word, the same report: “No evidence of human-to-human transmission.” Wang also calls attention to the steady stream of positive documentaries, with Hallmark titles like “Life Matters,” “Fighting Covid-19,” and “Chinese Doctors – Angels in White,” that proliferated China’s airwaves. At her best, she translates the sinister intentions bubbling underneath the suspicious patterns to uncover the machinations employed by manipulative regimes.