Short Documentary: In The Shadows Of Ebola

In the shadows of Ebola is a short documentary produced by Gregg Mitman and Sarita Siegel for the PBS Independent lens during and after the outbreak of Ebola in Liberia, a central African country. This documentry features a young Liberian, who was studying in the U.S prior to the outbreak, and his family, of which two of his sons were in the country during the outbreak. As the title implies, the Liberian student and his family had to live through the terror of Ebola, witnessing the destruction brought by the virus and experiencing the obstacles of getting away from it. The documentary starts with Emmanuel Urey the student narrating his country’s recent history, of its civil war and its people’s daily lives. This helps the audiences to build up an

Throughout the documentary we can see lots of footage of officials burying the bodies of the Ebola victim. Those bodies were particularly focused on. Meanwhile there is a scene when a burial man recalled the public awareness of hygiene. He said that he had tried to stop a man from getting into an Ebola-infected room but failed. Then he was about to be buried by the man. These editing gave us a vivid image that if we don’t pay attention to hygiene, we will be the next victims. Despite of these inspirations to the audiences, there are some drawbacks in the production of the documentary. First, it is biased, that the documentary is only able of present a small portion of the stakeholders with their opinion voiced for only a matter of seconds. For example, when the documentary shows the government was quarantining West Point, it only showed some interviews of the locals with each of them only lasted for seconds. No government official was interviewed. This may create a biased view in the audiences’ mind and hinder the audiences from understanding the full picture of the