How to Survive a Pandemic

We no longer see children running around playing in the alleys of Seoul. Starting from elementary school, children go to private classes after their school. However, we see these people who are making efforts to protect children’s right to be a child and play like a child.

In 2019, 1.2 million people stepped off a cruise ship into the small, south-east Alaskan town of Ketchikan. The next year, in 2020, zero did. After decades of diligent work building a sleepy fishing, mining, and logging town into one of the most sought after cruise destinations in the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed Ketchikan into an empty shell—lined with restaurants, shops, and attractions for the visitors who no longer come. Now, the town must find a way to survive without its key economy until the day arrives when cruise visitors once again pour into its docks.

A grandmother, mother, and daughter quarantine together in a Tribeca apartment as they laugh about life over wine.

Escape from everyday life in freedom and community and live utopias - for many organizers and artists, the secret of the music festivals that make culturally weak Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania a place of pilgrimage for tens of thousands of people every summer. But instead of freedom, community and utopia, there was one thing above all in the festival summers of 2020 and 2021: silence.

At the beginning of the year 2020, a relentless plague sweeps the planet and, as a consequence, a global lockdown is gradually decreed: how did people from very different latitudes, living necessarily very different situations, experience this shared solitude? How did people adapt to the restriction by decree of their personal freedoms and the transformation of many bustling metropolises into ghost cities?

Portrait of the birth of a friendship between two men, while one helps the other to die. The acceptance of pain, the sense of humour and the commitment to family and friends, will accompany the virtual chats between Fernando and Eric, who were unable to meet due to the pandemic.

When Melbourne’s cultural hub is left devastated post-pandemic, the creative industry, like many others, is ravaged. Set amongst the ashes of the cities arts scene, BOHEMIA is a hybrid of documentary, music video, and next generation concert film that powerfully recounts the story of this fallen angel of Australian culture and asks the looming question: “what now?”. Shadowy underground musician VANTA and debutant director Madeline Royce team up with a decorated collective of young creatives to contend that art in the pandemic need not be a compromise, but an evolution.

COVID-19. The whole world is in Lock Down. There is panic in society. What is going on? Is this actually about our public health?