Canadian filmmaker Mostafa Keshvari has managed to write, shoot and edit an hour-long, “ultralow budget” coronavirus thriller that features a group of strangers stuck in an elevator with someone who has the coronavirus.
According to The New York Times, Keshvari conceived of the idea while reading news headlines in an elevator about xenophobia toward Chinese-Canadians. At the time he began working on the project, the filmmaker says, “nobody thought a white person could get it,” referring to the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19.
As president of the BC Minorities in Film & TV Society, Keshvari advocates for “realistic representation of minorities in film,” and the movie “Corona” portrays a group of people from different backgrounds in a situation where their “true colors come out,” reports the news agency.
The Guardian reports that the movie was completed by March 8, and a subsequent poster for the movie features a cast of six characters, wearing muted colors, staring down a single Asian woman in a bright yellow coat at the center of the elevator.
A trailer for the movie posted on the same day maintains that racism and fear are the predominant themes in the film: “When unlikely neighbours are trapped in an elevator with a Coronavirus suspect, fear and racism spread among them faster than [the] virus.”
In the trailer, people inside of a crowded elevator try to shoo away the Asian woman, but then one man decides to let the woman on board.
Once on the elevator, the woman begins to cough, and everyone else starts becoming restless, with one woman eventually beginning to openly worry that “we’re going to die in here.” Another person in the elevator, a man with a swastika tattoo on his forehead, rants about open borders and later pulls a gun on someone while proclaiming “d***it, she’s got the virus.” At another point in the trailer, a pregnant woman appears to go into labor.
While it’s unclear how much time the cast spends in the elevator, the movie was filmed in a single take, a style that recently gained widespread attention after director Sam Mendez used a similar illusion to create the impression the film “1917” was made from a single cut.
Since the film only appears to focus on how racism and fear manifest themselves in the elevator, there remain legitimate concerns likely outside the scope of the fictional thriller, such as how the Chinese authoritarian regime itself has handled the coronavirus outbreak — a concern that many people incorrectly assume is rooted in racism or xenophobia.
According to The Washington Times, the Communist government of China has allowed the country’s wet markets to reopen, places where cramped vendors sell live animals, including wildlife animals, for human consumption.
The Wall Street Journal has called on China to permanently ban wet markets, on account that they were also the source of the 2003 SARS outbreak.
Chinese scientists have identified a “wet market”—where live and dead animals, including many wildlife species, are sold for consumption—as the chief suspect for the origin of the Wuhan coronavirus. The virus is closely related to the virus that caused the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, which also was transmitted to humans from a wet market. China closed all markets that sell wildlife and temporarily banned the shipment and sale of wildlife throughout the country.
Beijing should make the ban permanent whether or not the Wuhan market turns out to be the source of the current outbreak, and other countries should follow its lead. There are similar markets in other cities across China and elsewhere in Asia. If these markets, and human consumption of wildlife, persist, the public will continue to face heightened risks of viral disease.