Wang’s career marked by one remarkable film after the next
Documentarian Nanfu Wang’s latest film, “In the Same Breath,” now streaming on HBO Max, had quite a rapid turnaround. Depicting the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
But it’s no less thoughtful, carefully constructed and inquisitively insightful than any of Wang’s other films, an approach that has become her hallmark in a career that has been marked by one remarkable film after the next.
Wang, who was born and raised in southeast China’s Jiangxi province, was educated in the United States at Ohio University and New York University. Her work has consistently probed the Chinese government through an intimate and human perspective.
“In the Same Breath” turns its lens on how that manifested during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically focusing on the messaging and information presented by the staterun news media.
It’s a fascinating and sophisticated latest entry in her oeuvre, posing important questions and helping us to unpack the unseen and seen before our eyes — something she has done again and again in her work, which includes some of the best nonfiction films of the past five years.
Her debut film, “Hooligan Sparrow,” has similarities to “In the Same Breath,” focusing on the Chinese government’s stance on free speech, this time with regard to women’s rights activist Ye Haiyan, who has faced persecution and violence for her protests against child sex abuse. In “Hooligan Sparrow,” Wang herself, who is often a part of her films, struggles to even capture these events for fear of violence and intimidation, and depicts the harrowing process of getting her footage out of China. Watch it on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy, or rent it for $3.99 on iTunes.
Wang followed it up with a film set in the United States, “I am Another You,” a sensitively realized portrait of a young homeless man, Dylan, who has chosen the transient life in Florida, far from his middle-class upbringing in Utah. The film is a true participant observation, with Wang joining Dylan on the streets to understand his chosen lifestyle. Imbued with her signature rough-hewn beauty and told with her voice-over, it’s a deeply humane look at the homelessness crisis. Watch it on Kanopy and AMC TV+, or rent it for $2.99 on Amazon.
Wang’s Emmy-nominated 2019 film “One Child Nation,” co-directed with Jialing Zhang, returned to China to unpack the one child policy that existed from 1975 to 2015. Wang again applies her personal lens to the story, having been born under this policy and further inspired to explore the effects and dark side of it after becoming pregnant with her son. Wang and Zhang inspect the propaganda around this policy and ultimately uncover the human rights violations that it engendered, examining its traumatic aftereffects. Stream it on Amazon Prime.