- Hello, welcome to a special Q&A recording
of "76 Days," one of the 50 Official Selection titles
at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival.
This film plays as part of TIFF Docs,
which is generously supported by A&E IndieFilms.
My name is Thom Powers and I'm TIFF's documentary
programmer celebrating my 15th year at the Festival.
I'm honoured to be here with one
of the film's three directors, Hao Wu,
who's joining me from Atlanta, Georgia.
Thank you to our audience for being part of TIFF
during these unprecedented times.
We are grateful for your support to keep TIFF going
for years to come.
This film is eligible for the People's Choice Award.
You can vote for your favourite films at
tiff.net/vote.
Now, Hao, let's get into it.
These days you're based in the United States,
but you grew up in China
and you've made four previous documentaries in China.
Your most recent film is on Netflix.
It's called "All in My Family."
That's a personal story about you trying to explain
being a gay parent to your extended family in China.
And a memorable character in that film is your grandfather.
And I know that this film, current film, "76 Days,"
kind of got started because you were making another trip
to visit your grandfather in January.
Can you explain the background to how "76 Days" got started?
- Yeah, thanks Thom, for inviting me here.
So usually when I make documentary films I tend
to focus on character-driven stories.
I usually shy away from very newsy topics
because I always wonder what else can I provide
to a topic that's already being extensively covered
in the news.
But with "76 Days," the whole journey,
filmmaking journey, has been extremely personal.
So I flew back to China on January 23
to visit my family
to spend Chinese New Year's with them.
That was the day when Wuhan was put under lockdown.
- And you were in Shanghai visiting your family,
am I right?
- That's correct.
So my spouse and I were supposed to take my two kids,
little kids, to visit my family in Shanghai
because both my parents were diagnosed
with cancer last year.
So I wanted to spend as much time with them as possible,
especially being the younger ones.
But then one day before our departure,
we heard about this lockdown.
So we had a very agonizing time deciding whether
to go back or not, especially taking our kids,
because it just, like, incredulous.
With SARS happening in China back in 2003,
we thought the government couldn't have possibly hide,
you know, hide any facts about the severity
of the outbreaking we'll have.
But in the end we decided to play it safe.
So I flew back to Shanghai myself.
I'm spending the Chinese New Year holiday with my family.
It was a quite strange experience,
because Shanghai is the largest city in China.
Usually during Chinese New Year it's extremely festive
with a lot of people doing shopping, going to the movies.
But then during that week in Shanghai,
it was completely shut down.
There was very few people on the street.
It was like a zombie apocalypse movie set.
And then after I flew back to the US,
my grandfather was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer,
and he passed away really quickly, early March.
And I couldn't go to visit him
to say goodbye to him because of COVID,
because of the travel restrictions.
So it was all a very personal experience.
So when an American network approached me
to ask me if I wanted to develop a feature documentary
about the pandemic, I just jumped on board.
But that was just the start
of another complicated journey.
And so, talk about how you joined forces
with your two co-directors in Wuhan.
- I started researching the topic
for this American network in late February.
So I- Because in the beginning, at that time,
that seems so long ago now,
the pandemic was still pretty limited to China
and some surrounding Asian countries.
And I just- For me, I was- Like the rest of
the culture of China, like everybody else, I was under a lot
of confusion and frustration and anger as well.
Just, "How could this have happened?"
So I was spending a lot of time reaching out to reporters
and filmmakers on the ground
to understand what the situation was like,
closely following the media reporting,
especially social media.
And so I found my co-directors that way,
because their footage really moved me
and shook me and brought me so up close
and personal to the front line.
But then, you know, because of the geopolitical evolution,
the increasing, you know, fights between US
and China over this pandemic,
and my co-director very quickly said,
"Oh, we couldn't possibly collaborate with
"an American network to work on a film
"because we don't know where are you gonna take the story?
"Were they gonna say anything that's gonna be censored
"by the government in China?"
So they stopped collaborating with me.
And then in late March, I think, the pandemic -
in mid-March, really - the pandemic came to New York.
So I was starting filming in New York
and then that's when it hit me.
It's like the same story I heard,
I saw in Wuhan was happening again in New York.
- So the- Initially your co-directors were uncertain
about collaborating with you.
Then you overcame that.
Can you describe how that collaboration then continued?
- Yeah, I mean, it was a long journey.
So in late March, the American network kind of
dropped the project I was developing for them.
So my partner and my two kids had driven down to Atlanta
to stay with my in-laws, to escape New York, the epicentre,
the US epicentre of the pandemic at that time.
So in early April,
since I had nothing else to do in New York,
I just drove down to Atlanta
and quarantined in the basement for two weeks.
During that time I was by myself.
I had, you know, a lot of wine to drink
and I had nothing else to do.
So I started editing, playing around with the footage
from the two filmmakers I had been in touch with.
And I don't know whether because the quarantine
or because the wine, I found myself constantly in tears,
because watching them experience the pandemic
on the front line really moved me.
I also - that was soon after the passing of my grandfather,
so I guess I needed something to hold myself together
to focus my energy.
So I started editing,
even though the filmmaker said,
"We could not work with you."
So I started editing
and got back in touch with them to say,
"Can you please let me work on this film
"as an individual filmmaker not working
"for any American media companies?"
So they still said, "No, no."
But I keep on pushing forward.
But once I had edited
a complete rough cut, I showed it to them.
That's when they agreed to collaborate with me.
Because they could see where I was taking the film
and they could see I - like them -
I was paying a lot more attention
to the individual human stories during this pandemic.
- Can you talk about their ability to get access
to these stories?
You know, in the West, we hear a lot
about the difficulties of filming in China.
- Yes, I think it's not just difficulty filming in China,
because when I was trying to film in the US,
in New York, going to the hospital,
it was extremely, extremely difficult.
I think it would be more difficult here due
to the HIPAA laws, right, in the US.
So my two collaborators- Weixi Chen,
he's a video reporter for "Esquire China."
So he was embedded with a medical team
supporting a hospital in Wuhan.
So he was filming there.
He actually edited out a short, a 30-minute short,
that's shown online in China.
My other collaborator, Anonymous,
he's a local photo journalist
and working for a local publication.
So he was there just taking photos, but then he realized,
very early on, photos
could not do this justice.
So he started filming for the first time
with his 5D, Canon 5D.
- Can you talk about the quality of image-making that
these two cinematographers and co-directors captured?
Because I found myself, when I first watched the film,
pausing just to look at some of those images that
stand alone as still images.
It makes sense when you say that
one of your collaborators is,
by training, a still photographer.
- Absolutely, yeah. I think Weixi has
done some short documentaries.
So for him, it's more about the action,
following the characters, very hand-held style,
getting us very close to what's happening on the scene.
But with Anonymous, because, as you said,
he was trained as a still photographer,
so he was really sensitive to composition to the shots.
So that's what initially drew me to his footage,
is that, not only was he able to be there
with the characters,
and also he captured these amazing images.
And also because Anonymous was a local reporter.
So he knew a lot of the hospitals quite well.
So he was getting some great access
to be able to talk to the local patients, the local doctors.
- In North America, exposure to China
and documentaries from China still remains very limited.
And North American media is often presenting
China as a monolith.
You know, it's a billion people,
we rarely get to see individuals.
And I think something that really stood out to me is the
concentration on individuals in this film.
I wonder if you can talk about
the effort you've made in this film
and throughout your work to try to be
making films
about China that extend to international audiences?
- Yeah. I grew up in China, like I mentioned earlier,
and I moved to the US when I was 20.
So I was able- In the US,
I was able to form a queer family and have kids
and switch careers.
But right now I travel quite frequently
between these two countries, these two cultures.
So for me, sometimes when I think about it,
it's almost like China is like my parents
and US is like my spouse.
You know, a lot of times I see them get into fights.
I'm like, "Can we just all get along?
"Can we just take a step back?"
Obviously there are certain issues
that's fundamentally different between these two systems.
But on a lot of other things, I'm always like-
Because I could see a lot of debates from both perspectives.
So sometimes I get frustrated
with the instinct jump
to portray everything as black and white,
to see everything as monolithic.
So for my work, through all of my films,
I always try to focus on the human stories
because I try to remind the viewers,
despite our differences on many, many other issues,
we're still human beings.
We still have fears.
We still need to hold on to something,
feel connected when we are isolated,
when we are scared, and we still want to be loved.
So that has been a common thread in my filmmaking.
And that's what I'm trying to do, I think,
with the latest film, "76 Days."
- I want to ask you about Jean Tsien, who is a producer
on this film.
She has a long career, both producing and editing films.
She's been part of many films that have played
at TIFF before.
But she's a figure who's well known
within the documentary community,
but is not often in the public.
And so I wonder if you can talk about
what Jean Tsien has meant to your career.
- Honestly, Jean has been a fairy god-sister for me.
When I was making my feature-length documentary
"The Road to Fame,"
I moved from Beijing to New York to finish that film,
and I approached Jean and tried to ask for her help
to help me edit that film.
And she was pretty reluctant.
It took me a while to befriend her
and convince her to help me.
Ever since then, every single film of mine she helped edit,
and she also EP'd most of them.
And I just learned how to edit from her.
With this current film, back in April,
when I was just playing with the footage,
when I first started assembling a few scenes,
I sent it over to Jean.
I was like, "Jean, I didn't know whether I had a film
"or not. What do you think?"
She immediately wrote back after watching them.
She said, "I cried, so you have a film."
And so we've been discussing all along in terms of how to,
you know, how to finish editing the film,
how to take this film out to the world
along this entire process.
So I'm really grateful for Jean's participation.
- So, we're recording this in August,
just a little bit before the film festival.
As of this moment, the film is still an independent film.
You're in the process of looking for distribution.
Can you say anything more about that process or what your
hopes are for the film?
Right now, TIFF audiences are the first people
to see this film.
Where do you hope it goes from here?
- I'm just feeling extremely, extremely lucky
I'm able to finish this film and actually premiere this film
because, for a long time, when I was editing, I didn't know
whether my co-directors would ultimately license the footage
to me, agree to collaborate, and let me finish this film.
So I'm happy with whatever comes.
But in the meantime, yes,
we have started exploring distribution.
But distribution for this film, I think, would
be a little bit more difficult
because COVID is such a global phenomenon.
A lot of the broadcast networks or streaming platforms
already have some films in production.
So whether they will be able to
or want to take another film onto their slate,
that's a big unknown for us at this point.
But regardless, I'm really happy this is gonna go
out into the world at TIFF.
And we have a few festivals lined up already,
at least in the US, in the fall.
- Well, I think that once this film gets seen,
there's gonna be a lot of attention for it
and it's gonna go very far.
We're really proud to start the journey for this film.
Thank you again, Hao, for being with us.
- Thank you, Thom.
Thank you TIFF audience.