‘Blame’ Director Christian Frei Talks COVID Conspiracies, RFK Jr.: ‘In a World Where Nothing Is True, Everything Becomes Possible’

variety.com:

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor While keeping up with news reports in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Oscar-nominated Swiss director Christian Frei began to experience a feeling that “those who warned us would eventually be the ones who are blamed.” This sentiment, which he calls an “epiphany,” is at the heart of “Blame,” which opens Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel on Friday. “Blame” follows three scientists who researched the origin of the SARS epidemic that first broke out in China in 2003, Linfa Wang, Zhengli Shi and Peter Daszak.

The latter is the former president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization that supported various programs on global health and pandemic prevention, and, in January of this year, was entirely defunded and debarred by the U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services following an eight-month investigation on its “failure to adequately monitor the activities of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).” Frei’s film begins with the first SARS outbreak in 2003, chronicling how the trio of scientists would come to spend the next two decades trying to stop subsequent pandemics just to be then discredited when disinformation campaigns and fake news on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread.

On the sensitivity of the subject of “Blame,” Frei tells Variety he became “much more comfortable” once he decided to approach it as a “classic journalistic story.” “I also wanted it to be told through the empathetic lens of documentary,” he adds. “I wanted to give the subjects room so their voices would be heard but also resist simplification, which is not the easiest from a commercial point of view.” The director recognizes that resisting simplification often dampens a.