How can a story of epidemic aid that happened 7 years ago and thousands of miles away resonate with today's audiences? This is the question that many people had in their minds before the TV series "Ebola Frontline" began. What is unexpected is that this breakthrough work of China's aid to Africa medical theme fully excavates the unique story temperament and deduces a different kind of truth and excitement in the innovative narrative of the grand theme.
Ebola, the king of the virus, doesn't sound strange, but the virus is terrible, and only those who have experienced it know it. The opening scene of "Ebola Frontline" shows the moment of the outbreak of the epidemic in Africa in 2014. At the beginning of the episode, the Chinese medical team is about to complete a two-year mission to aid Africa, and inside and outside the China-Qatar Friendship Hospital, there are feelings of farewell everywhere. At this moment, the epidemic suddenly arrived, and this was the first time that the audience was shocked by the ferocity of Ebola through the camera: the infected people were convulsing, the blood spilled from the mouth and nose was mixed with organ fragments, and the blood stains were everywhere they passed... At the beginning of the encounter with Ebola, people did not know who the opponent of the virus was, and even the most professional doctors would be afraid when they saw this scene. In the picture, Zheng Shupeng, a virologist played by Luo Jin, rushed back to the Sino-Qatar Friendship Hospital, saw the blood stains on the ground, and stood in the corridor in an instant, with doubts in his complicated eyes, and even a trace of fear, which was the instinctive reaction of people to unknown dangers in addition to the quality of professional doctors.
In the play, after it was determined that the dead patient was infected with the Ebola virus, which had no cure and a fatality rate of up to 50%-90%, the Chinese medical team that should have embarked on the journey back to China was closed in the small courtyard of the medical team. In the collective silence, a team member came up with a sentence of "Will we die elsewhere", some people had an instant emotional breakdown, and some people lost their voices and cried bitterly. Xie Yunhu, a doctor played by Liu Tianzuo, was still cheering everyone up one moment, but in the next clip, he was helpless because he suspected that he was infected with Ebola. In the outbreak encounter, everyone is trying to overcome the fear in their hearts. This plot, without seeing the aura of the protagonist, does not deliberately render the heroism and fearlessness of the healer, but presents it with real humanity, successfully bringing the audience into the anti-epidemic life and death battle that occurred 7 years ago and thousands of miles away.
Many viewers are a little unfamiliar with the story of "Ebola Frontline", as the plot develops, the characters in the play tell the background of this theme: since 1963, China's medical aid to Africa has been more than half a century old, for a long time dozens of countries in Africa have been stationed in Chinese medical teams, some Chinese medical personnel will always leave their lives in the recipient countries. The realism of "Ebola Frontline" first comes from these stories that have really happened, which is based on the story of the Chinese medical team fighting the Ebola virus in 2014, when the epidemic first appeared in Guinea, and the first Ebola patient was personally treated by Cao Guang, a Chinese doctor at the China-Kyrgyzstan Friendship Hospital, who is one of the prototypes of Zheng Shupeng, the male protagonist of "Ebola Frontline". In the encounter, Dr. Cao Guang's partner Qasm fell on the front line of the fight against the epidemic, and he is the prototype character of the doctor Qasim who unfortunately died of the epidemic in the play. In 2015, the China Aid to Africa Medical Team was named the 2014 Person of the Year that touched China. It is only today, through the artistic reproduction of the disaster blockbuster "Ebola Frontline" that the audience truly understands how arduous the medical team went through in those years.
In addition to the realistic plot, the language of the shots of "Ebola Frontline" also makes the audience feel empathy. The work uses a highly saturated, high-contrast color style to tell this anti-epidemic story, highlighting the tense, dangerous and dangerous story characteristics. Based on the documentary style, many places in the play use a one-shot approach to maintain the flow of video style. In the last hug of Gesm's "corpse", the first perspective of the helmet camera builds a strong visual impact, allowing the audience to be in the environment in which the character is located, better substituting into the plot, and experiencing the emotions and states of the characters.
In the play, the death of african doctor Gesm becomes the starting point of the male protagonist Zheng Shupeng, in order to find out the truth as soon as possible, he risks his life and alone breaks into Sangyi Village, the source of the epidemic, which is controlled by rebels. The plot scene thus moved from the hospital to the vast African land, and the perspective of fighting the epidemic suddenly broadened.
In this story full of African temperament, the fight against the epidemic is not the only main line. In the play, He Huan, a Chinese journalist played by Mao Xiaotong, goes deep into Africa for secretly visiting bloody diamond smuggling, and unfolds a story line that exposes crime, which is a bold artistic fiction that rarely appears in the previous main theme drama. In Sangyi Village, Zheng Shupeng meets He Huan, disguised as a doctor. In the fourth episode of a women's childbirth scene, Zheng Shupeng and He Huan are forced to die by armed personnel in the process of treatment, and the two people resonate with the concept of life first between life and death. In this suffocating clip that makes the audience nervous, the two story lines of fighting the Ebola virus and exposing the truth about diamond smuggling intersect without a trace. In the subsequent plot, the two male and female protagonists who have secrets with each other are attracted to each other because of their "chivalry", and Zheng Shupeng, who has been bound by professional rationality, also begins to truly integrate into the African culture with unique charm, trying to open the atrium to feel life.
This is the most surprising place at the beginning of the work, which creatively mixes the theme of aiding Africa against the epidemic and the legendary genre story, and finds a balance between the reality of life and the truth of art, neither violating nor suspending, and the narrative is extremely powerful. Through life and death, love, and war, the plot intertwines the contest between science and disease, light and darkness, while focusing on shaping the group portrait of the Chinese medical team, it also presents a fuller and more moving "Ebola front line", as well as a real, beautiful and simple Africa, as the general director of the play Yang Wenjun said, "We not only want to tell what the medical team did, but also want to explain why it is done." Reporter Qiu Wei