Ai Weiwei’s film Coronation is being shown at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva this weekend. This is a first for the documentary, which delves into the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Swissinfo.ch | March 12, 2021 |
“The world will probably never know what really happened in Wuhan just over a year ago,” says the Chinese artist, now living in Portugal.
Coronation is a rare window into China’s health crisis: the initial Chinese cover-up, the chaos from an unprepared health system and the more than three-month lockdown of Wuhan, cut off from the world and left to fend for itself.
The film has never been shown publicly, nor streamed on major platforms. This, according to Ai, is due to Chinese political pressure on the international film industry.
The Geneva festival didn’t bow to Chinese pressure. This weekend the film is being shown at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human RightsExternal link. In an interview with SWI swissinfo.ch, Ai says he has no illusions: the democratic wave of the past 40 years is coming to an end and censorship will be the rule in the post-pandemic world.
SWI swissinfo.ch: You are not welcome in China. How did you manage to film in Wuhan?
A.W.: I filmed the first pandemic, in 2003, when SARS appeared in China, so it is not the first time I deal with this topic. I have been doing investigative films in China for quite a long time, which have already got me in trouble. I know how to film and what to film. We had colleagues and artists in lockdown in Wuhan. We knew it would be a dramatically sad story. But I never predicted it would be a global pandemic and that we would still be under the same situation today, with thousands of people dying every day, and still no signs that the pandemic will disappear.
I contacted the people that I know and trust. I gave them directions each day after the images were sent to me. It was incredibly difficult because of the lockdown situation. People couldn’t move. But I had people in six hospitals and also in the temporary wartime barracks which were set up to deal with the patients.
SWI swissinfo.ch: What did you want to show?
A.W.:We tried to show different viewpoints. Not only of the hospitals, but also of human life, of abandoned and forgotten people. The big majority of the people [in China] are voiceless. Once you don’t have a voice, you don’t count. Or you are just a number. Emotions and values are no longer relevant.
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