“We are in the process of resuscitating him right now,” says a nurse on the phone. “Unfortunately he didn’t make it, we tried everything,” says another. Doctors run across the corridor clogged with beds, a monitor only shows a straight line, again a Covid patient has not made it. Matthew Heineman gets as close as it gets to patients and hospital staff in New York in his film The First Wave. Its producers and cameramen shot at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center on the outskirts of Queens during the first four months of the pandemic. The faces of the doctors and nurses are hidden behind the masks and protective screens, but their eyes and gestures tell the story to the audience. They shake their heads in resignation when another patient dies; tears run down their cheeks when they talk about how overwhelmed they have been. No one prepared her to tell relatives about the death of her loved one over the phone, says nurse Kellie Wunsch. And the internist Nathalie Dougé says that she never feels like a hero, even if the New Yorkers call her that.
She wasn’t allowed to hold her baby
Heineman’s cameras are where the pandemic was and is worst: in the extended families living under one roof and in the small apartments of the city employees and hospital workers. Brussels Jabon and many of their relatives work as nurses – almost the entire family became infected. Jabon was pregnant when she became infected, and her baby had to be fetched by an emergency caesarean. She can’t see it. The child is brought to cousins, because the Jabons have to continue working in the danger zone while Brussels fights for their life intubated. Heineman shows how people try to bridge the distance to their loved ones – the tablet wrapped in plastic that nurses hold out to patients is a constant in the film. Ahmed Ellis’s five-year-old son writes stories for him that the school policeman cannot hear because he is too weak. Ellis is also struggling with death for two months. Like the Jabons, he and his wife, who works in the hospital, could hardly avoid the contagion – and Ellis’ diabetes makes him a risk patient.
It is true that most people in New York spent the pandemic “shielded from reality,” as the filmmaker said in an interview. Heineman lets his cameramen get as close to this reality as possible. In doing so, he crosses borders – and when a patient, visibly marked by poverty and long illness, takes his last breath in front of the camera, ethical questions about access, dignity and consent are obvious. But it is precisely these scenes in the film that remove the gentle filters. The families who filmed Heineman’s teams for hundreds of hours had reasons of their own for taking their struggle before witnesses. Brussels Jabon and her family came to the United States from the Philippines more than twenty years ago. Ahmed Ellis is black and was born to immigrants from Guyana. Jabon, Ellis and their families agreed not only to show the world how dangerous Covid is, said producer Gene Gallerano at a performance in New York. They would have felt safer with the camera crews too. “The chance seemed to be greater that their loved ones would receive the best possible care.” The pandemic made it clear how disadvantaged people who are not white are in the American health system.
An unjust health system
Heineman’s film dispenses with expert interviews, but not with classification. When George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis at the end of May, the streets were filled with protesters, people were handing out pizza and protective masks, sitting together on the intersection in front of the great library on 5th Avenue, blocking the bridges from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Nathalie Dougé, the African American doctor, leaves her apartment one of these days with a cardboard sign that reads: “Racism is a public health problem”. Doctors and nurses organize demonstrations. Heineman shows police officers bludgeoning protesters. Dougé pulls away a young black man who is yelling at a police officer.
New York remains a divided city in the pandemic. Gramercy Park, one of the whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan, reported 31 deaths per 100,000 residents in the spring of 2020. In Far Rockaway, a poor neighborhood with 40 percent black and 25 percent Latinos, 444 people per 100,000 died. Heineman builds his film entirely around the struggle for life and death. Scenes from the hospital and from the families’ apartments are only occasionally interrupted by news images. Then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has since resigned on allegations of sexual harassment and coercion, provided guidance to New Yorkers with his daily press conferences – and anyone who spent the pandemic in the city will remember that time when Cuomo’s appearances in the film. Despite the force of his pictures, Heineman does not do without dramatic music. The hospital scenes in particular could have survived without this reinforcement. And the director shows the news videos from the mass graves on Hart Island with their ambiguous television commentary. He does not explain that the mass graves were not created because of Covid, but that they also exist on the island in normal times – for the many people who have no one or whose relatives are too poor to be buried. Nevertheless, the film is a successful testimony of historical significance – and a warning for all vaccination refusers if they would see it.
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