A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces (河流，奔跑著，倒映著)

Premiered in the Forum section of Berlin Film Festival 2021, A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces is an ambient, time-layered portrait of Wuhan. Zhu, who left China for the United States in 2015, filmed these cityscapes on visits home between 2016 and 2019 with the intention of producing a project about urban redevelopment. After Wuhan became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, she restructures the work and blurs the line between pre-pandemic footage and pandemic response. The 87-minute documentary opens with seven minutes of CCTV surveillance footage from the quarantine period, February 8 to April 4. In the footage, the streets of Wuhan appear to be nearly empty, except for the occasional passersby, but the quietness is suddenly interrupted by air-raid sirens and car horns. For three uninterrupted minutes, the city comes to a standstill to mark a national day of mourning of COVID deaths.

The body of the film comprises static long takes of Wuhan’s built and natural environments, shot between 2016 and 2019, unfolding in reverse chronological order. Without dialogue, Zhu’s camera focuses on views of demolition and construction sites and Yangtze River (the longest river in Eurasia, which has played a major role in the history, culture, and economy of China for thousands of years). The portrait of Wuhan becomes three-dimensional and multi-faceted: it is not only the assumed origin of a novel virus, it is also a busy ancient city port for commerce, a city that birthed an uprising that overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty, and a city of rapid modernization. Zhu aims to destigmatize Wuhan, and present the city with non-interventional clarity. Her preference for extreme long shots immerses the viewers physically and emotionally, enabling an observational effect. Threaded throughout the film are four letters written by Zhu and based on true stories from four grieving people, addressed to a husband, a grandmother, a father, and an older brother, respectively, all of whom died from coronavirus. These letters are presented silently, placing a line of handwritten Chinese characters on-screen one at a time. This is how Zhu comes to showcase a response to the crisis, although COVID-19 is never mentioned by name in the film.

As a landscape film (a documentary technique that comprises shots of natural or built environments, often empty of human activity and replaces landscape as the protagonist), Zhu utilizes a structure to organize images not only of a pandemic Wuhan but a contemporary Wuhan, which challenges both state-oriented narratives and the stereotypes that proliferate in Western mass media. Towards the ending credits, the song “Drunk with City” by the Wuhan-based hardcore punk band SMZB plays on the soundtrack, breaking the silence with a riotous tune. Zhu instills her personal feeling about her hometown, reinstates a version of Wuhan that the pandemic had threatened to erase: a sense of place, memory, and local identity.