Cinema Wednesdays - Clément Guntern
Documentary selected in competition at the Geneva FIFDH, Coronation by Ai Weiwei gives voice and image to those who experienced at close quarters the advent of a new form of oppression: the health dictatorship set up in Wuhan on January 22, 2020, its brutality and its lies.
Ai Weiwei needs no introduction: an internationally renowned Chinese artist who naturally combines art and politics, and an exiled spokesman for China's increasingly stifled democratic opposition. It seems only natural that he should explore a major event in our contemporary history: the coronavirus pandemic that first appeared in Wuhan, central China.
Produced and directed from Europe by Ai Weiwei, this feature-length film is the result of a discreet, long-distance collaboration between the artist and a network of more or less amateur Chinese filmmakers. The latter provided him with hundreds of hours of footage.
Lives inside containment
From its earliest days, the film recounts the invention of modern Chinese-style confinement: brutality, excess, lies and propaganda. Through short amateur sequences taken - notably with the aid of smartphones - at the time of confinement, several protagonists illustrate sometimes their struggle against illness, sometimes against the clutches of the Party-State, sometimes against both: the nursing staff, an immigrant worker who can no longer return home and sleeps in his car, a decorated former member of the Party, her more liberal son who exasperates her, patients forcibly detained, relatives of missing persons...
From the first days of confinement to the lifting of the measures, the documentary is structured through a variety of portraits, revealed only half-heartedly. Rare dialogues between the protagonists also emerge, through scenes from their daily lives that have become dramatic or apocalyptic under the new confinement regime. There's a whole range of diversity, from those who march with the regime, assuring the dozens of young people who have come here that there's nothing to fear, to those who are fighting to be allowed a crumb of the official truth, that of the speech delivered by the representatives of the authorities.
Violence and fear
Time and again, we wonder what risks these people have taken to bring us these images, often poignant in their intensity or revolting in their brutality. Above all, they reveal the violence of a new form of dictatorship and the story of bereavement; the courage of certain protagonists who put their lives at risk to fight the virus, and the cowardice of a Party-State with the phenomenal resources of its members, adept at lies and censorship instead of protection and help. Absurdity in the service of power. Nothing illustrates this better than this man, who is required to have a party member present at the ceremony in memory of his father, who died of Covid-19, but is offered «30% discount on tombstones».
Coronation shows us indoctrination and fear, which should have remained that of the virus, but which also became that of the regime. It didn't take long for public violence and propaganda needs to take over. Even in the midst of confinement, the Party had to regain control and assume the role it had always played: that of sole guarantor of stability, order and public truth.
What victory?
No matter how many times this elderly woman has been decorated for her efforts as a member, once the urgency is lifted and the gains of action diminished, the Communist Party cares little for the weakest. A few weeks earlier, she had said that the Party would give everything to its people - unlike foreign countries - but when her son told her that from now on, no expenses would be reimbursed, she didn't seem to understand.
At the end of the documentary, the contrast is striking between this man, who has been denied the right to mourn, and a certain youth, fed on the Party's successes of the last two decades, who, within the very walls of the hospital, swear allegiance to the regime. A devastating pandemic must not divert China from its path to power, even if it means crushing its people: the coronavirus has been defeated.
If, as the director and producer asserts, several festivals around the world have rejected his work, we can measure just how far the West still has to go before we can raise our heads and truly defend our values.
Write to the author: clement.guntern@leregardlibre.com
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