The Oscar-nominated documentary features a Filipina nurse’s COVID-19 ordeal
One of the 15 documentary features vying for an Oscar in the coming 94th Academy Awards is Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave, an inside look at the COVID-19 health scare as the Emmy Award-winning director and his team attached themselves to the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York City to close in on its frontliners and patients.
Known for his character-driven cinema verité style, Matthew followed internist Dr. Nathalie Douge, school safety officer Ahmed Ellis, and Filipina nurse Brussels Jabon, among others in this intense 93-minute documentary.
The First Wave captures the “ins and outs” of coping with life and death at a time COVID-19 struck the world, creating pandemonium in 2020. The virus was relatively new and no definite treatment was laid out during the shooting. It was all “hit and miss.”
In Matthew’s point of view, we see people, recognize their names, and hear their voices and the audience empathizes.
The once “full of life” humans are now weak, lost, immobile, staring blankly at the camera. “I’m sorry to tell you this but we have tried multiple rounds of CPR and we were unable to bring him back,” confesses Dr. Douge to her patient’s family over the mobile phone. In the chilling background, we hear the wailing cries of the family members. Some scenes are “unwatchable” due to the graphic intensity of patients fighting for their life.
Ahmed is 35-years-old, high risk, overweight, and diabetic. He is intubated and relies on a ventilator. His wife, Alexis, is his rock. She video calls him regularly with their son, Austin, trying to keep his spirit alive since they cannot visit him at the hospital.
In the film, a Filipino family was introduced while praying the rosary. Brussels was pregnant with her second child when she got infected with COVID-19. Her husband Naph recalls their predicament. “We rushed her to the hospital and she had an emergency C-section,” he recounts. “But things got worse.”
Brussels who hails from Davao City belongs to a family of nurses. She migrated to the US in 2000. Sadly, the family members all got infected. Naph cannot be with his wife, who is intubated, and his newborn son. “Worst experience of my life,” he says.
‘When you are struggling to take a breath, every second feels like an eternity.’
Dr. Douge gives us the reality on what goes on in the ICU. “When you are struggling to take a breath, every second feels like an eternity,” says the Northwell Health frontliner. “Every minute feels like forever. That is the look I see multiple times in a day but people don’t see that.”
In the hospital, they have a tradition to play the song “Here Comes the Sun” whenever a patient gets off the respirator. A close up of Brussels’ hand slowly moving up or Ahmed’s thumbs up comes at a time a glimmer of hope embraces our hard-working medical heroes in moments of darkness.
The documentary doesn’t feel “claustrophobic” because the camera is brought outside the toxic hospital environment into the patients’ home and the landscapes of New York City.
“I obviously was not a doctor or nurse but we witnessed every single day,” says Matthew, The Boy from Medellín filmmaker and Dartmouth College graduate. “People we thought would survive would die. And people you thought would die would survive. You can never make a bet or tell what would happen. That was really, really devastatingly sad.”
The Pare Lorentz Award winner was difficult to watch because of the intensity of the visuals and sounds, and the reality of mortality. And sometimes, death becomes the final destination for most COVID-19 patients.
“Every single frame, every single sound, every single pixel was deliberated on, was thought about, was contemplated until the very, very end,” discloses Matthew.
Onboard is Oscar winner Jon Batiste from the Soul fame, who was the documentary’s composer of the score and closing credits song, “Breathe.”
“This is something every single person on this earth must be touched by,” reveals the American music director, to whom the film provides a vehicle by which the audience can reflect on what they have been through since the pandemic started. “What have we learned as individuals? What have we learned as a society? Now, how can we apply that to the future?”
Matthew was courageously brave shooting and capturing horrifying cases with sensitivity at one of New York’s hardest-hit hospitals. We witness the resiliency and the deep faith of the patients, health workers, and family members hit by the deadly virus and are somehow reassured that all will be well. As Brussels writes on her pad, “I want to get better and I will be better.”
The 2016 Primetime Emmy winner for Cartel Land is currently making a film about the end of war in Afghanistan. “I was there for many months leading to the fall of Kabul,” reveals the two-time Directors Guild of America (DGA) winner. “My parents want to kill me, I think.”
National Geographic Documentary Films has acquired the Oscar-nominated documentary produced by Participant and Our Time Projects.