While New York plunged into survival mode, the three aspiring documentarians, all involved with the youth film-making program DCTV Youth Media, picked up their cameras. Their short films, collected along with two others in HBO’s Covid Diaries NYC, observe the dizzying freefall days of early quarantine, from the corrosive fear of sending off loved ones to frontline jobs to the toll of isolation, the family strain of sudden unemployment to the summer’s electric charge of protests for racial justice. The six-minute films are all the more impressive in their brevity, each memorializing, in casual, stripped-down fashion, an individual thread of the generational catastrophe spinning through New York.