Pandemic Patterns Explored in The Fire This Time

From award-winning artist, writer, and filmmaker Mariam Ghani, The Fire This Time chronicles centuries of data to contextualize a world recently struck by global pandemics.

Built from three historical episodes — cholera, the third plague, and the 1918 influenza pandemic — the short film illustrates patterns in the social stratosphere of these events, comparing the parallels to COVID-19. Each of these plagues ushered in immense change and loss of life, social unrest, rioting, and the mass destruction of property. History begs us to ask ourselves, “What will we learn from the fire this time?”

Fading between collages of archival visuals with fragments of non-archival footage, The Fire This Time is a story about human behaviour across time that reveals an unexplored connection between public health outbreaks and social upheaval.

The film features the voices of science journalist Sonia Shah, poet and literary scholar Anjuli Raza Kolb, medical anthropologist Christos Lynteris, epidemiologist Keiji Fukuda, economist William A. Darity Jr., and historians Nayan Shah, Kellie Carter Jackson, and Nancy Tomes.

The Fire This Time has played at BlackStar Film Festival, BAMcinemaFest, and Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival.

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work operates at the intersections of language, loss, migration, memory, and history. Her films have screened at the Berlinale, Rotterdam, SFFILM, CPH:DOX, DOC NYC, and Ann Arbor film festivals, among others. Her work has also been presented and collected by the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the St. Louis Art Museum, among others. Ghani’s first feature-length film, the critically-acclaimed documentary What We Left Unfinished, tells the mostly true story of five unfinished Afghan Communist films and premiered at the 2019 Berlinale. It was released theatrically in the US, had its streaming premiere on the Criterion Channel, and was recently re-released on BluRay by Dekanalog & Vinegar Syndrome. Her second feature film, Dis-Ease, looks at the real consequences of how we imagine disease, and premiered at the Tate Modern and BlackStar Film Festival in 2024.

Watch The Fire This Time now at fieldofvision.org.

Field of Vision is a filmmaker-driven documentary unit that commissions, creates, and supports original short-form and feature-length nonfiction films and episodic series about developing and ongoing stories around the globe.