2025 Student Academy Award Winners Series Part 9: I Remember

I Remember, dir. Jane Deng

From New York University the 52nd Student Academy Awards winner Jane Deng brings us her documentary film I Remember.

On the surface the student short film is a COVID-19 documentary shot largely on ground zero, at the homes and hospitals of the Wuhan population - where the director was “lucky” to have perfect timing; With a masters degree and a new husband in her trunk she traveled from the UK back to China towards the end of 2019. At the time the pandemic was not acknowledged as such just yet, but it did block the newlyweds from going on their honeymoon to South Korea. Intrigued by the growing global phenomenon Jane decides to look into Wuhan, and eventually she finds a contact willing to meet her on site to interview a household with an infected family member struggling to find healthcare.

As with many promises made early pandemic this ends up being far from the truth, once on site she finds herself abandoned with a family reluctant to even let her through the door given the risk of infection. Eventually Jane makes it through and manages to get footage of the stark reality of the first people infected. Now mind you this is prior to much of the research, prior to any vaccines and prior to many countries initial reactions. It is easy to put the following footage into a post-Covid mindset and point towards what could have been, but the reality here is that all people involved on or off camera took a huge risk with no real safety net behind them. What follows is a micro lens angle of a handful of specific cases in the very early days of the pandemic, as Jane tries to navigate not only a foreign sickness and an uninformed response to it, but also a profession she is new to and an area of the world she has not been familiar with for many years.

When the documentary continues and you start to peel back a few layers, you notice a second narrative begin to unfold where the focus is on journalism as an industry, and about a young girl finding her place in the world around it. We watch her make bold decisions in search of that dream, such as staying in Wuhan when her colleagues leave to pursue stories elsewhere. We also see Jane part ways with most of her prior relations including her husband.

This is where the long stretch between filming a majority of the footage and actually making the final edit comes into play, because while a lot of the footage from inside the Wuhan hospitals could have made huge headlines at the time, the restraint of deciding not to release it and instead give it the lense of a post-pandemic perspective yields a completely different narrative from all the covid docs we have seen come and go.

Ultimately this is through and through a big, risky swing from Jane Deng wherein the resulting documentary is much more up front and personal than you would likely expect from a 2020 (and onwards) documentary, and it is arguably a swing that paid off. It is very impressive to see this level of restraint from a director new to not only the subject matter but the field of documentary filmmaking itself. For that alone this warrants a watch, and I truly believe it can serve as inspiration for a lot of upcoming documentary film makers going forward.

Review by: Robin Hellgren