Movie Spotlight: Teddy Show: A Lockdown Story

In the spring of 2020, someone in Auckland started putting teddy bears in their window every morning. Different scenes each day, a small performance for whoever happened to walk by. Nobody had to stop and look. But they did.

Yalin Zou read about it in a news article and couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant. Teddy Show: A Lockdown Story grew from that moment. The film follows eight-year-old Meiling and her grandfather Richard, stuck together in a New Zealand COVID lockdown, who turn a neighborhood teddy bear hunt into something their whole street starts waiting for. Zou wrote it, produced it, and directed it. The bears were his way in. The relationship between the two of them became the actual film.

A story that changed shape

The earliest version of the screenplay had a single mother at its center. That changed when Zou met Mark Hadlow, an acclaimed New Zealand actor whose warmth and sense of humor convinced him to rewrite the role as a grandfather. Hadlow read the revised script a month later and called to say he loved it. The story became what it is now. Two people from different ends of life, navigating the same locked-down house and eventually doing something about it together.

The cast that came with its own life

Finding Meiling Brougham was its own kind of luck. She shared her character’s background, with Māori, Chinese, and European heritage, and had the life experience to draw from naturally. On set, the chemistry between Brougham and Hadlow was real enough that it became hard to direct around. During one scene about unusual news stories from lockdown, Hadlow suddenly dropped to the floor and started pretending to be walked like a dog. Brougham responded in character without missing a beat. None of it was planned. Zou kept it. After filming wrapped, the two stayed in touch. They still call each other grandfather and granddaughter.

Hope without the escape hatch

Lockdown films tend toward two extremes: they wallow in the anxiety or they pretend it isn’t there. Zou wasn’t interested in either. “Hope is not an escape from reality,” he says, “but a way of facing it.” The film doesn’t erase the loneliness. Meiling and Richard feel it too. But the film is less interested in the pandemic than in the people living inside it. Auckland goes quiet around them. Dolphins appear in the harbor, in an area usually full of boats and noise. The city stops belonging only to humans for a while.

Two shows, two kinds of courage

Richard and Meiling create two Teddy Shows. The first draws from Māori tradition, using a Haka to encourage the neighborhood to face lockdown with some spine. The second celebrates the end of it. Zou wrote Māori culture into the story because it is simply part of what New Zealand is, not because the film needed to demonstrate anything. The language in the film reflects the same instinct: English and Māori were in the script, and a few Spanish words emerged naturally on set. He kept those too.

What to know before you press play

In Zou’s words, Teddy Show “is not a sad or heavy film about the pandemic. Rather, it is a film about hope, kindness and the connections that bring people together.” Approach it as a story about human connection and the pandemic becomes the backdrop rather than the subject. The kindness in the film is real. It was in Auckland during those months too.

Drama

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Streaming now on Relay.