CAPTURING THE COVID CRISIS

Behind The Mask

Side-lined during the Covid-19 pandemic, Doctor Paul Trotman used his time in lockdown to create a documentary on the impact of Covid-19 on health care professionals across the world.

Paul Trotman

A wall of names of more than 3,000 health care workers who died because of Covid-19 appears at the end of Paul Trotman’s documentary Behind the Mask – On the Frontline against Covid.

The sombre list takes nearly three minutes to scroll past and serves as a poignant testament to the toll the virus has taken on people across the world and those at the front line of care.

“I realised early on Covid-19 was going to be a lot bigger than anyone expected and there was likely going to be some political will to forget the efforts of my colleagues during this time,” Dr Paul Trotman said.

“I didn’t want that to happen.”

Trotman has always had an interest in film and theatre and says his doctoring supports his filmmaking. Early in his career as a doctor he worked as a locum in the United Kingdom while writing pilots for radio sitcoms.

He has produced films about human cadaver dissection and about Joseph Merrick (‘the Elephant Man’), and he even starred as Dr Know in an American-produced film likened to ‘medical MythBusters’.

Trotman was taken off active duty when Covid-19 appeared in New Zealand due to his immunecompromised status.

“I tried to find something I could do via phone. But, in a small rural hospital, there was not much space for me. It was a frustrating time until a friend told me to make a film about it.

“I was being paid by the government to sit at home during lockdown and I wanted to make good use of that time. I started emailing colleagues, here and overseas, asking them to do the same.”

This approach meant Trotman was conducting interviews about Covid-19 in the time before vaccines, when countries overseas were seeing the worst of the infection take hold.

The confronting nature of the voices within his documentary reflect the confronting times health care professionals faced as the virus swept across the world.

“I conducted more than 110 interviews and received more than 200 hours of footage,” Trotman said.

“It was easy to have people open up. I have a conversational style and go into interviews without an agenda. I spoke to people quite early on in the process, when coronavirus was still raw and people were very freaked out.

“If you interviewed people now you would get a different level of emotion and different stories. There are vaccines and Covid-19 is not the monster it was back then.”

Those stories included tales of the lack of medical supplies, the lack of beds and the tough choices being made in first-world hospitals about who could, and would, receive the best treatment.

First-hand accounts from medical professionals who dealt with families who lost people to Covid-19, and one who lost everyone and chose to refuse treatment for himself, make for a powerfully surreal narrative about the human impact of Covid-19.

“I haven’t done my job if people are not slightly uncomfortable with what they’ve heard,” he said. “I hope these stories from people on the front line, who put their lives on the line, go some way to sway people who were naysayers – those who didn’t believe in Covid or wearing masks – to see the impact on people treating patients first hand.”

Trotman was assisted by Dunedin Hospital, which gave him access to an unused emergency department ward to recreate scenes of people being intubated and extubated to use within the film.

Filming staged in Dunedin Hospital.

“We generally had people doing the jobs they were trained to do,” he said. “The nurses who were extubating people were experienced in what they were doing. We even had the emergency department kit up in full PPE for an hour and allow us to film them doing their jobs.”

Being a registered medical doctor is a key part of Trotman’s filmmaking process.

“It keeps me honest,” he said. “It also gives me ideas for films and access to places I would not normally have access to. I don’t think I would have gotten access to film in the cadaver dissection room had I not been through it first.

“It also means, when I am interviewing people, I am speaking the same language.”

The film received accolades across the world including Best Medical Film at the Mannheim Arts and Film Festival 2023 and Best Medical Film at the Berlin Indie Film Festival in 2022.

Cover art for Paul Trotman's film.

Trotman is looking for his next film idea and has plans to either tell a story about dementia in New Zealand or take an in-depth look at the decision-making behind sending the country into lockdown.

“I think both would be fascinating stories,” he said. “I’ve always been fascinated with following a story on dementia but am yet to find the right story to tell. I also think learning about the lockdown process would be fascinating.”

ASMS IS ORGANISING FUNDRAISING SCREENINGS OF BEHIND THE MASK IN WELLINGTON AND INVERCARGILL IN JUNE. IF ANY OTHER BRANCH OF ASMS WOULD LIKE TO ORGANISE A SCREENING, WE CAN HELP WITH THE LOGISTICS. EMAIL ANDREW.CHICK@ASMS.ORG.NZ .