They are 17 to 21 years old and have been in confinement in New York. But not in a loft overlooking Central Park, or in a luxury Fifth Avenue skyscraper. The pandemic, they lived it, they still live it elsewhere, in apartments small like shoeboxes, without balcony, nor courtyard, nor video game console, nor privacy. Crowded with their essential worker parents.
Much has been said about young people as the sacrificed generation, but little time has been given to them to really express themselves. HBO did, for real, by giving five of them not only the floor, but cameras as well. Go for it. Tell your life story.
The resulting series – and which is not yet complete – is as true as it is felt. The choice of the protagonists, sensitive, awake, turned towards the other, has a lot to do with it. Rather than spending their entire days on TikTok, all of them film their elders. Those to whom their existence is all the more linked now. Each director has a theme. “Impossible to escape New York. “” When my father contracted COVID. “
Arlet Guallpa, for example, follows his mother who takes three different buses every day to take care of the elderly and to do housework in substandard housing. “What is this, mom?” “Oh, he’s just a rat. “
Marcial Pilataxi helps his grandmother, a janitor in a building “for the rich”, to take the mountains out of the trash. “There are really a lot of them since everyone’s stuck at home. His camera lingers on the piles of black bags, which multiply in the distance.
Some also film the demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, the burnt cars. Animation sequences in lead pencil, signed Rosemary Colón-Martinez, intersect the whole. There is nothing licked in these images. Nothing romanticized.
In a passage that one would say staged if it was not so realistic, the young Marcial goes out at night to find friends. They haven’t seen each other for a long time, they have fun, they recite lyrics from hip-hop pieces. They momentarily forget the pandemic, they take each other by the shoulders, they take off their masks.
A man on a bicycle stops and starts yelling at them. “You don’t give a damn about other people! Don’t you love your grandmothers? ! I love mine, BUT SHE IS DEAD! “
The laughter of friends also stops dead. The aspiring filmmaker returns home to find his granny cleaning the floor. ” I am sorry. “
And now ?
More than a report could ever show, Covid Diaries captures the details, the fluctuations of emotions, the atmosphere of an existence between four very close walls.
We hear the cough of a father, a metro repairman suffering from the virus. We see the door to her bedroom that the mother opens and closes, opens and closes, only to bring her food. There is sometimes crying, a little discouragement, and a lot of confidences.
Son of a restaurateur, the eloquent Shane Fleming is very worried that the latter must have gone out of business. Her mother, a kindergarten teacher, must now sing her nursery rhymes on Zoom. Above all, she must count how long the family will be able to last before being put on the street by a predatory owner as it is too prevalent, everywhere.
You can feel her slipping into depression. Even a stay in the countryside, which the clan hopes will save them, will not succeed in stopping their tears.
The reality of the pandemic strikes here, beyond the debates about “screen time”. “If I don’t pay the rent, we pick up in the street,” says the father, the bus driver, to his daughter, after having managed to extricate himself from a much too short sleep. “Is your job more important than your life?” She asks him. ” Yes. »
We feel the uncertainty, the weight of responsibilities, the pressure of a city that never stops and the cruelty of a system that wears out its most vulnerable citizens to the tune. We also feel that these young people are getting closer to their parents, their grandparents, that they realize all the sacrifices they make on a daily basis.
Even if they have to stay in their family bubble, they don’t get stuck in their navel. A budding filmmaker asks questions from afar to the men in moon suits who are disinfecting the home of a deceased neighbor. “The world is falling apart as we talk to each other. But as long as there are young people like this, the world will not fall apart.
It didn’t go well
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