“Nurse Unseen” - Film Review
It doesn’t even take a full minute for Nurse Unseen to make the viewer feel like they’re back in March of 2020. The opening montage does an incredible job of bringing the fear and the uncertainty to the front of our minds again. March 2020 was a month of isolation, confusion, and doubt about what the future would bring. In mere weeks, the vulnerabilities of people were blown up on a global scale. Almost overnight, the world changed. For those whose jobs went remote, there was a feeling of being trapped, contained within the walls of their home. Healthcare workers found themselves on the frontline of a war against a virus that felt like it was changing every single day. Humanity lived on unstable ground for months, and we’re still far from understanding the effects Covid-19 had on all of us. Nurse Unseen chronicles the beginning of Covid and the Filipino nurses who were dealing with an unprecedented virus and a growing rise of anti-Asian hate in the United States.
After reminding the audience of the terror of the early days of the virus, Nurse Unseen pivots to charming home videos. The subject of these videos is Dodo Cueva, who is the aunt of the film’s director, Michele Josue. Filipino people make up 4% of the nursing population, but also were a third of Covid-related deaths in the medical profession. Nurse Unseen wants to put faces to these numbers and, as much as the film covers larger topics, it still feels deeply personal. The viewer is invited into the lives of Dodo Cueva and others, including Rosary Castro-Olega, one of the first healthcare professionals in Los Angeles County to die from Covid-19. We can talk about percentages, death rates, and the immense loss that came from the pandemic, but behind every single number is a person.
courtesy of Nurse Unseen
The structure of Nurse Unseen is quite compelling, as it's able to move between many different storytelling threads without ever making the audience feel like it’s missing something. Not only does the documentary cover Covid and the personal stories of the Filipino nurses who worked during that time, it also explains why there are so many Filipino nurses in the United States. The Philippines has more nurses per capita than any other country, but the reason behind this goes back to the Philippine/American war and the United States’ “benevolent assimilation.” In actuality, there was nothing benevolent about the presence of the US in the Philippines, and nursing was used as a means of “civilizing” the Filipino people.
Beyond that, the Philippines served as the base for the United States’ Pacific presence during World War II. Filipino nurses were trained in the Americanized way of nursing and were responsible for caring for injured soldiers. After the war ended, the United States struggled to find enough nurses back home and turned once again to the Philippines. The Immigration Act of 1965 removed the de facto discrimination against Asians and immigrants of other nationalities. While it could be seen as part of the social change that was happening in the ’60s, it’s impossible to overlook the connections this has to how deeply the United States is tied to the number of nurses in the Philippines. Nurse Unseen supplements this brief but thorough history lesson with a plethora of archival footage that paints a vibrant picture of the past.
courtesy of Nurse Unseen
In another filmmaker’s hands, Nurse Unseen, despite its subject matter, has the potential to fall flat. The film is mostly made up of traditional talking-head interviews, but director Michele Josue uses them as more of a voiceover than stagnant, extended, one-sided dialogue. The amount of news footage, photographs, home videos, and other pieces of film that the film has compiled is quite staggering. Together, they add up to the sort of documentary that’s as compelling as it is essential. We need to hear the stories of the people who experienced an unfathomable amount of trauma in such a short period of time. One of the film’s most infuriating moments is footage of a large banner that says “Heroes Work Here” as a nurse’s voice recounts how hospitals were fighting against each other to get PPE because the government wasn’t equitably distributing it.
“I think the next pandemic is the mental health pandemic,” says one of the film’s interviewees. For so many years, people, nurses especially, have been in a survival mode. They saw loss on a scale that’s impossible to comprehend, and their Herculean efforts should not go unnoticed. For many Filipino nurses, this career is more than simply providing care. They went to work every day at the height of Covid because it was their job and because they had family members in the Philippines relying on them. Nurse Unseen is taking the brightest spotlight and shining it on people who rarely find themselves on the receiving end of acclaim and recognition.
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