FACT CHECK: Clip of a 2013 Korean movie “Flu” gets viral as visuals from Italy.

Movie scenes related to virus outbreaks seem to be a common medium for spreading misinformation related to COVID19 on social media. Few days back, we unearthed the truth behind the mass graves in Italy with this fact check which turned out to be a scene from a movie called “Pandemic”. On a similar note, a scene of a mass graveyard claiming to be footages from Italy was circulated on WhatsApp and Facebook which showed an entire Football stadium full of dead bodies and huge cranes carrying these dead bodies.

Facebook page called “HEY LOOSU LOVE YOU” shared the video post given below, with the caption “Please stay at home... Please pray for Italy…” and during the video the word Italy kept on popping up giving an impression it was a scene from the current chaos in Italy, devastated by COVID19 pandemic.

Fact Check

In order to ascertain the origins of this video we did a Yandex reverse image search using the video’s key frames and we were able to locate an article with the scenes from the above claim in relation to a Korean movie called “Flu” from 2013

Directed by Kim Sung-su “Flu” (Gamgi (2013)) movie plots around a lethal, airborne virus infecting the population of a South Korean city less than 20 kilometers from Seoul.

We saw a couple of instances where the Flu movie with English and Hindi subtitles had been uploaded to YouTube last week as the movie plot resembles to current spread of COVID19. While inspecting the movie we were able to locate the instance used in the viral clip of large cranes operating in a stadium. carrying body bags as below

We also noticed the simulation video of how this scene was created using the below footage with wire-solver

[R&D] bodybag Simulation with Wire-solver from xanix on Vimeo.

Conclusion

From our investigation it is evident that a scene from the Korean movie “Flu” released in 2013, has been used as misleading video posts giving the impression of death bodies in Italy being dumped into a stadium. However, Italy continues to battle with COVID19 with over 100,000 infected from the deadly virus with almost 12,000 deaths by end of March 2020.

Title:FACT CHECK: Clip of a 2013 Korean movie “Flu” gets viral as visuals from Italy.

Fact Check By: Sathyajith Subasinghe

Result: False