Close-up of the Covid-19 outbreak

In media coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, something is missing: raw images and video of the devastation the disease causes.

If such images existed, many believe, there would be less misinformation on social media of the sort that has led many in the United States and Europe to believe that the disease is a hoax or "just the flu" and to hold anti-lockdown protests.

In the West, reasons for the blackout include the patient's right to privacy and the hospital's fear of exposing its practices to scrutiny. Even if those roadblocks were somehow bypassed, it takes a brave camera operator or journalist to step into a Covid-19 ward.

New York-based Chinese film-maker Wu Hao, 49, is grateful that his co-directors "jumped in" early last year when beds in Wuhan hospitals were filling up with those stricken by a frightening new disease.

"And they didn't just do a quick news piece, they had the patience to follow the story. I was lucky to find them," says the 49-year-old in an online video call.

His collaborators spent weeks in various hospitals, tracking patients from admission to discharge, or the morgue.

The result is the documentary 76 Days, which records the period following the start of the lockdown in the city of 11 million. It opens in Singapore on Saturday.

The documentary's frank look at what happens on the medical front lines has earned it a perfect 100 per cent score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It is now tipped to earn an Oscar nomination. Oscar shortlists will be announced on Feb 9, with winners revealed on April 25.

In February last year, Wu began receiving footage shot by two people who would become his collaborators: Chen Weixi and another person who prefers to remain anonymous.

"We had all read reports about what was happening, but watching the video, I felt like I was in the eye of the storm, watching real life unfolding in front of my eyes," says Wu. His previous documentary, The People's Republic Of Desire (2018), chronicling the world of Chinese live-streamers, earned festival plaudits in Stockholm, Seattle and Oslo.

In the raw footage from Wuhan, he saw the potential for a film. The pair based there would regularly upload footage to the cloud, through the so-called great firewall of China. Wu, after consulting with them, would edit the footage, eventually narrowing the focus on a few main characters.

"I needed to talk to them because the situation at the hospitals would change so quickly - patients we had been following would get transferred to another hospital or deteriorate so fast they couldn't talk any more or even die," he says.

The pair could, as Wu says, "roam freely" around the wards because in the early days, certain hospitals were critically short of protective equipment and turned to the media for help. As a result of media coverage, overseas Chinese organisations started fund-raising campaigns to send medical supplies to the worst-hit places, he adds.

Media blackouts would come into force later.

Wu says the film puts the focus on human stories and avoids making political points, referring to how some groups in the West have alleged that China covered up the Wuhan outbreak and gagged whistleblowers.

For now, he is unsure if his film will be released in his home nation, for both commercial and political reasons. He knows one thing: It has been pirated. After news about the film's award wins and nominations hit Chinese social media, copies of the documentary began circulating there.

At first, netizens praised its compassionate view of patients and medical workers.

Then a faction found his short film All In My Family, now on Netflix, about how Wu and his same-sex partner formed a family in the United States and came out to relatives in China. They also found photos he had taken with Taiwanese officials.

"That's when they attacked me for using a Chinese tragedy to smear China for the sake of appealing to Westerners. It's topsy-turvy right now. It's not affecting me personally, but it's why one of the directors has chosen to remain anonymous."