A Video Letter to My Friend under Quarantine in Wuhan | Arrow Factory
Guo Rongfei—Arrow Factory
Documentary filmmaker Guo Ronghui published what she called a “video letter” to a friend under lockdown in Wuhan. Guo reads aloud from Chinese translations of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Albert Camus’ The Plague, and Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, over a montage of footage she collected from the Internet—men ice-swimming in protective masks, neighbors sharing drinks through their windows, as well as less tranquil scenes of street scuffles, temperature checkpoints, and barricaded doors. The film also lingers on footage of a lone pig running along a highway, apparently in complete solitude and freedom. Widely shared on social media, many of these surreal images have become memes whose origins are hard to track, yet together they constitute a shared memorial of fear and resilience.
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Documentary filmmaker Guo Ronghui published what she called a “video letter” to a friend under lockdown in Wuhan. Guo reads aloud from Chinese translations of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Albert Camus’ The Plague, and Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, over a montage of footage she collected from the Internet—men ice-swimming in protective masks, neighbors sharing drinks through their windows, as well as less tranquil scenes of street scuffles, temperature checkpoints, and barricaded doors. The film also lingers on footage of a lone pig running along a highway, apparently in complete solitude and freedom. Widely shared on social media, many of these surreal images have become memes whose origins are hard to track, yet together they constitute a shared memorial of fear and resilience.