It started with a stare, which is usually the case in moments like this. While on a walk with his then-three-year-old daughter through his neighborhood one afternoon in March 2020, shortly after the first COVID-19-related lockdown went into effect in the city of Toronto, Yung Chang noticed a white man walking ahead of them on the other side of the street. The man turned around and stared at Chang and his daughter, walked on, and then turned around and stared again. Prior to COVID, it's likely that Chang wouldn't have given the man's behavior a second thought. However, in the few months that it took for the pandemic to ravage the globe, racist rhetoric — and, later, actions — towards Asian and Asian-American individuals ignited just as quickly. In fact, per CTV, Canada reported a 300% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020. While there were varying reports of racist incidents, from verbal to physical abuse, any marginalized person knows well how these things too often start with a stare.

Chang's encounter with the other man thankfully didn't escalate beyond an exchange of some nasty words, which he writes about in a personal essay for CBC, but it was a moment that he describes in our interview as "nonetheless threatening" and one that left him "reeling" for days after. Perhaps serendipitously, it was a week after this incident that Chang was first contacted by Starlight Media to direct Wuhan Wuhan, a documentary that, filmed at the height of the pandemic, offers a deeply intimate look at the Chinese capital as the city and its inhabitants banded together during its biggest crisis in recent history. "I connected immediately to what I was seeing," Chang says of the footage that was initially sent to him, "which was a very humanistic portrait of individuals who were struggling and figuring it out and working together."

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Starlight Media

Though Chang grew up in a small Canadian town, he's no stranger to pointing his camera at China and its people. Indeed, his breakout hit movie Up the Yangtze, released in 2007, explored how the construction of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River in the province of Hubei affected the rural communities nearby, shining a particular light on the transition from a farming-based economy to consumer capitalism. Then, in 2012, his sophomore documentary feature, China Heavyweight, followed two boys from rural China, Miao Yunfei and He Zhongli, as they are recruited and trained by boxing coach Qi Moxiang to become pro athletes and potential Olympic champions.

With Wuhan Wuhan, however, Chang didn't actually shoot the footage himself. Somewhat of an unprecedented production process — then again, these are unprecedented times— an entirely separate crew had shot the footage at the height of Wuhan's initial lockdown in February 2020, and Chang directed remotely from Toronto while his editing team in Los Angeles put everything together. "I felt strongly that this would be a film that would cut through the salacious headlines, the 'kung flu' bullshit," he says about what compelled him to take on the project. "[The footage] felt familiar. It felt like how I may, as a director, approach the filmmaking of a story like this, not unlike [Up the Yangtze or China Heavyweight], and so I felt a sort of responsibility to take on the story."

Working With 300 Hours of Footage

Since 2020, there's naturally been a rise in COVID cinema, that is, films using the pandemic (or ideas of a pandemic) in different ways to explore myriad themes from connection to survival. However, what makes Wuhan Wuhan stand out is the way in which it follows multiple storylines, spotlighting real people affected by the pandemic and lockdown in very different, very real ways. At Wuhan No. 5 Hospital, there's Dr. Xiannian Zheng, the ER Chief Physician, and ICU Nurse Susu in the thick of providing medical care to the most severe cases of COVID, all the while experiencing supply shortages, navigating the unknown, dealing with difficult patients (like Grandpa Shen) and, of course, risking themselves to possible exposure. The Fangcang Temporary Hospital shows Dr. Guiqing Zhang, a psychologist who volunteers her expertise to help those cope with mandatory quarantine, which includes Xiuli Liu and her nine-year-old son Lailai. And, on the outside, there's Yin, a factory worker who volunteers to be a medical driver after being furloughed from his regular job due to lockdown, and his very pregnant wife Xu, who is nervous about giving birth to their first child in the midst of a pandemic.

For Chang, the challenge was turning the 300 hours of footage sent to him into a feature-length movie. "There were nine different stories that the crew had followed," he says, which eventually whittled down to the five storylines mentioned above. "It wasn't without a struggle. In the editing process, you kind of linger with something until you feel like, 'Okay, we've tested it with audiences, we know it's not working, it needs to flow better,' and then you have to let go of the things you hold on to in service of the greater story." That said, Chang always wanted Yin and Xu to be the beating heart of Wuhan Wuhan. "We always knew that the top storyline would be [of] the young couple and that everything else would fall in place. Sometimes, you have magical moments of how things just flow, and, sometimes, you have to rigorously work to shape the story into place. At the end of the day, you have to step back and say, 'Okay, this is what we did.'"

Related: Pandemic Movies and Examining the New Meaning of 'Normal'

Wuhan Wuhan Invites Audiences to 'Go a Little Deeper'

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Starlight Media

Wuhan Wuhan fittingly made its world premiere at Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival in April 2021, where a lot of the best documentaries play, before working the festival circuit, screening at the Asian American International Film Festival in New York and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, to name a few. What's most notable about the documentary is that it doesn't necessarily seek to answer questions about COVID itself. Indeed, Chang says the goal was to ultimately cut through the misinformation and racist rhetoric that pervaded the mouths and minds of many, audaciously empowered by the U.S.'s former, twice-impeached President, and ultimately show the strength of community and collectivity in times of crisis. When asked if he had accomplished that goal, Chang says, "It's hard. The audience that I wish to reach probably wouldn't watch a film like this — it's just the reality of it — but I think, maybe, what it has done to certain audiences who gravitate to the film is offer, like I think I did with Up the Yangtze and China Heavyweight, to go a little deeper than what we glean from headlines and newspapers and articles that we may read online."

Towards the tail-end of our interview, Chang shared a quote from a 7th Century Japanese government official: "We may be separated by mountains and oceans, but we share the same sky and the same feelings." It served as a sort of creative and emotional compass for Chang and his crew throughout Wuhan Wuhan's editing process. "Whenever we would feel like we wanted to go into more politicized terrain or waver from our objective and our theme, that quote would remind us of our goal."

Wuhan Wuhan is available in select theaters and on VOD on May 6, 2022.