Love and Loss: The Pandemic Five Years On is an emotionally shattering re-examination of Covid

For those of us who are lucky enough to lose nobody, the 12 months between March 2020 and March 2021 now have the quality of a strange dream. When we think of the period, it is often in the context of alternating boredom and strangeness; bread making and homeschooling; bingone Tiger king And wonder if 4pm is too early for a glass of wine. Could it have been five years since Boris Johnson stood at his podium, did we say that he shook hand with Covid patients, and shortly thereafter announced the first locker?

Catey Sexton, the director of BBC One who affects the documentary – and sometimes crushing – Love and Loss: The pandemic 5 years lateris very aware of this. “It feels like we’re in a hurry to forget and move on,” she says. But for Sexton and tens of thousands, it’s not so easy. She lost her mother during the first Covid wave. Her mother was one of the thousands of people who came together in care houses, behind Matt Hancock’s famous “protective ring”. “All I could do was blow through the window,” recalls Sexton. “Mom couldn’t understand why I was outside.” Later in the film, she expands on her sadness. “Mom has spent all her life looking at everyone,” she says. “My biggest sadness is that I couldn’t do it for her at the end.”

To her credit, and for the benefit of the film, Sexton keeps her own experience largely from the story she tells or intertwines with the sadness of the other grieving people with whom she interviews. Her subjects know that she understands it and the result is a significant act of common witness and memory. The film’s narrative is essentially linear, a simple decision that gives the film a gently simmering polemic force. It was rightly, rightly, never allowed to overwhelm the personal stories of loss – but also correctly, never completely disappeared. The British government had the pandemic wrong in installments and they were subtly but persuasive here. “I don’t want heads on nails,” said one woman, acknowledging the extreme problems of the task the government faced. It is: looking at this film must be reminded of how bad we failed by our leaders at that time. And for so many of us, how much that failure costs.

About the same time, Boris Johnson addressed the nation, and NHS kept themselves busy. They were preparing to make sacrifices – and more than 2000 of them would make the greatest sacrifice of all. We hear about the family of Areema Nasreen, What Covid caught in the hospital she worked in – which was also the hospital in which she born her children. And the family of Rebecca Regan, who slept in a caravan so she didn’t bring the virus into her family, And who could not be vaccinated because she was pregnant. After a while, slap for carers increased and co -opted, But it started, we are reminded here, as something spontaneous and almost painful.

The weekly applause is one of the many moments in the film that catches you off guard; It reminds us of the many surreal moments that seemed normal during the pandemic. But always the memories are filtered by loss and sadness. Rishi Sunak’s absurd Eat out to help the initiative is treated with the mockery it deserves. But in reality, as the year was going on, no one handled themselves well. The country’s physical health crisis has also relentlessly become a mental health crisis.

Jenny McCann remembers her brother John as a man who liked life. He was obsessively healthy, enjoyed physique and was careful what he ate. When 2020 continued, he became increasingly susceptible to conspiracy theories. Insulation fed his suspicions and he refused the vaccine. In 2021, the virus killed him. “I’m no longer with my brother because I believe the conspiracy theories,” says McCann. “I’m crossing the Peddlers of the Disinformation.”

This film makes it clear that Covid has never really ended for many people. Some have long covid. Others are still protecting. But for the grieving, there is nothing but sad – and often anger – to the unnecessary loss of beloved family members. Sexton offers a nuanced perspective on the aftermath. There is a bank overlooking the sea, dedicated to Rebecca Regan. In some cases, there is a feeling of newly activated political involvement as a result of the failure of the government. And there is even a new dress artist: Ellis channeled the loss of his grandfather Berrice in Queera Lynn – part of the queen, a tribute to his grandfather’s favorite singer. “It’s very easy for these people to slip away and become numbers,” says Ellis. “But in fact, they were real and they meant something.” Catey Sexton made a moving, important and timely film; It all does right.