Ithaca College

The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and Cinemapolis present a talkback on 76 DAYS, a new film from China chronicling the COVID crisis in Wuhan from the ground up.

The talkback is slated for Thursday December 10 from 6-7:15 p.m. It features Dr. Stewart Auyash, Associate Professor of Public Health; Dr. Elizabeth Wijaya, Assistant Professor of  East Asian Cinema, University of Toronto; and Rikun Zhu, independent filmmaker from China.

76 DAYS opens at Cinemapolis Virtual Cinema on Friday December 4. 

It can be accessed here for a nominal ticketing fee: https://cinemapolis.org/film/76-days/

Register for the talkback here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0pcOmgqjssG9CJJveXjlrls744Zayy51MW 

76 DAYS

On January 23rd, 2020, China locked down Wuhan, a city of 11 million, to combat the emerging COVID-19 outbreak.

Set deep inside the frontlines of the crisis in four hospitals, 76 DAYS tells indelible human stories at the center of this pandemic—from a woman begging in vain to bid a final farewell to her father, a grandfather with dementia searching for his way home, a couple anxious to meet their newborn, to a nurse determined to return personal items to families of the deceased.

These raw and intimate stories bear witness to the death and rebirth of a city under a 76-day lockdown, and to the human resilience that persists in times of profound tragedy.

Directors: Weixi Chen, Hao Wu
Writer: Hao Wu
Country: China

“One of the best I saw via Toronto is “76 Days”, a tough, very good Chinese documentary about the first months of the pandemic in Wuhan.”

– Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Bios of Talkback Speakers

Dr. Stewart Auyash is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Physical Education at Ithaca College. He studies and teaches public health policy, public health communication, and media representations of public health. He has written and spoken about his observations and experiences living in Singapore during the SARS epidemic. While teaching online during the pandemic, he is revisiting the numerous books and articles that forewarned about a catastrophic global public health event and why so few paid attention to these projections.

Rikun Zhu is an independent film director and producer, as well as a curator from China. He is the founder of Fanhall Films and chief editor of cinema website fanhall.com. Zhu founded Documentary Film Festival China in 2003, which is one of the earliest independent film festivals in China. As a director, Zhu’s has directed and produced many documentaries, including The Questioning, The Dossier, Welcome, Dust, and Anni.

Dr. Elizabeth Wijaya is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies and Cinema Studies Institute of the University of Toronto, where she is curating an Asian Short Films archive for the University of Toronto (Mississauga). She is Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She is convening the 2020-2021 JHI-UTM Annual Seminar Series on "Mediating Race, Reimagining Geopolitics." In 2020, she was awarded the Connaught New Researcher Award for a project on "Luminous Waves: Transregional Visions and Networks in Contemporary Southeast Asian Independent Cinema."