Stories of the Pandemic

In March 2020, students in the English and Spanish programs of Digital Video Reporting in Context had to return home unexpectedly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Classes and video production continued, and some of these projects were about the coronavirus crisis.

We present here a compilation of some of these projects.

  • Emma Satin creates the context for the compilation with her project, which, taking as its starting point and ending point the way we were infected, explores the impact of the arrival of the virus in the United States.
  • In her first work for the compilation, Sierra Zane suggests the potential of humor to survive the pandemic.
  • Ben DiFilippi makes a shocking and ghostly black and white portrait of the confinement in New York.
  • Sierra Zane, in her second contribution to the compilation, describes in the same terms the community in which she lives, although with a point of hope at the end.
  • Poetically, Maddie Keyser expresses in two projects the concept of isolation during the pandemic; in the first, through a suggestive crystal ball and, in the second, by observing the calm and enjoyment of a group of friends who shut themselves away to paint.
  • In her compilation video essay, Claire Ogden offers a different view: that of those who have taken advantage of quarantine to be overly productive.
  • Rebecca Torrence is overwhelming in expressing the unease that can be felt when living permanently surrounded by silence.
  • Finally, Emilio García offers us a transcendent vision of the experience we are living, and with it, the proposal that only if humanity acts as a single cell, as a single organism, will we have a chance of survival.