Nanfu Wang: Last News

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In June 2017 The New Yorker magazine published a piece under the evocative title, “Remembering the Murder You Didn’t Commit.”

In January 2020, New Jersey-based filmmaker Nanfu Wang traveled to her native China with her young son to visit family. As fate would have it, the country was about to face the explosion of Covid-19, a public health emergency that would, of course, go on to envelop the entire globe.

How does someone document the onset of a pandemic? Director Nanfu Wang found herself tasked with that very question; her response is the Sundance 2021 selection “In The Same Breath.” The documentary is an unflinching look at Wuhan during the COVID pandemic’s earliest days. It’s a portrait of how one city confronted the unknown while also focusing on the human toll that is sometimes forgotten.

In the closing moments of her blistering account of government and media mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic in both China and the U.S., director Nanfu Wang says: "I have lived under authoritarianism and I have lived in a society that calls itself free; in both systems, ordinary people become casualties of their leaders' pursuit of power." Like last year's 76 Days, the first half of Wang's film is an urgently immersive recap of the chaos that gripped Wuhan at the start of the outbreak in early 2020. The second half turns its haunted gaze to the arrival of the virus on American shores, and the refusal to heed ample warning signs and contain the foreseeable spread.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticNow that we’re a year into the pandemic (and have a presidential administration that’s forging a sane response to it), the time feels right for taking stock — for looking back, in a big-picture way, at how the crisis unfolded, the ways it was mismanaged, and how we can learn from the vast pileup of mistakes and corruption. Nanfu Wang, the director of the wounding and disturbing Sundance documentary “In the Same Breath,” has made exactly that kind of movie.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterThe latest project from celebrated filmmaker Nanfu Wang, about the early days of the coronavirus outbreak in China and its spread to the U.S., will release this year from HBO Documentary Films.Titled “In the Same Breath,” HBO came on board as a producer and distributor at the start of production of the film with Wang, who won Sundance’s grand jury prize for documentary in 2019 with the acclaimed “One Child Nation.” The film will debut at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday.Wang assembled a brave team of field producers, camera operators and subjects on the ground of a heavily-censored China to investigate the shadowy media campaign executed by the government in alleged attempts to conceal early

Matthew Carey Emmy-nominated filmmaker Nanfu Wang is unusual for someone of her generation in China—she’s got a sibling. She was born in 1985 in the midst of China’s one child policy, which limited women to having a single baby.