VANCOUVER, B.C. — In between the time the coronavirus started to make headlines but before life shut down to restrain the pandemic, an independent filmmaker conceived, shot and finished postproduction on a movie about the contagion.

Thanks to the availability of relatively cheap digital equipment, there is rarely much lag time these days between real-life events — like Hurricane Sandy in 2012 or the Japanese tsunami in 2011 — and films about them. But this new movie, by Mostafa Keshvari, is unusual in that it was made even as the story is still unfolding.

Keshvari’s 63-minute “Corona” looks at what happens when seven people are trapped in an elevator, and begin to realize that one of them has Covid-19. The movie is about fear and “a study of society, people and moral choices,” Keshvari, 33, said in recent phone and email interviews about the movie. “We are all in this ride together.”

Vancouver, known as “Hollywood North,” is Canada’s gateway to Asia, and also an epicenter in the country’s Covid-19 crisis. As news reached here of a “Wuhan virus,” there were increasing reports of harassment of Chinese-Canadians and others of Asian heritage. Patronage of Chinese-Canadian businesses dropped by up to 70 percent.