Convergence: Courage in a Crisis review – nine stories from the Covid frontlines
“I can’t breathe” went mainstream as a rallying cry during the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, just as respiratory difficulties of a different kind were beginning to exact an increasingly frightening toll across the world. This panoramic and often moving Netflix documentary about Covid-19 courageously tries to draw a straight line between the pandemic and the underlying social inequalities it flushed out everywhere. But as it spans nine different stories in eight countries, it ends up too diffuse to make telling political points and ends up uncomfortably close to the kind of globetrotting montages Roland Emmerich disaster flicks wheel out to show shared planetary ordeals.
Convergence certainly has a knack for emotive sweep, and there’s no doubting the courage and self-sacrifice on display in many quarters here, from a Wuhan volunteer ferrying medical workers around the ground-zero city in early 2020, to the reformed São
Paulo criminal pulling comatose slumdwellers out of the favelas. Her segment, and that of the Miami doctor trying to ensure Florida’s homeless are protected, are where the outrage burns fiercest. They bring home, in the awful, stricken faces of the asphyxiated, how the virus has further cut into the structural vulnerabilities that appear with depressing consistency in different societies.
There are some cheering outcomes, not least how these fresh injustices seemed to give Black Lives Matter heightened legitimacy, as well as the story of Hassan Akkad, the Syrian refugee and volunteer hospital cleaner in the UK who forced a U-turn on the health-worker bereavement scheme.
Convergence, though, often prefers to express its indignation in abstractions, such as letting WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus denounce racism, while indulging in grand gestural optimism. Which lets the Covid policy failures of negligent politicians like Johnson, Trump, Modi and Bolsanaro off the hook. Perhaps the Michael Moores and Alex Gibneys of this world are needed to conduct that kind of inquest, but even in terms of its attempted emotional cross-section of the pandemic, Convergence spreads its net too wide. That much is clear from the closing montage of assorted global citizens singing Lean on Me in unison. Didn’t we excoriate celebs for that kind of thing?
• Convergence: Courage in a Crisis is released on 8 October in cinemas and 12 October on Netflix.