11'09"01
dir. by Samira Makhmalbaf, Claude Lelouch, Youssef Chahine, Danis Tanovic, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Ken Loach, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, Amos Gitaï, Mira Nair, Sean Penn, Shohei Imamura
Galatée Films/Studio Canal

Just a day after Sept. 11, the French television director Alain Brigand had an idea: He would ask 11 filmmakers from around the world to respond to the terrorist attacks on the United States with a short movie 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame long. "Everyone was to take hold of the subject and translate their interpretation of the event, fed by their countries, their history, their languages, their memories," he told the UK's Guardian newspaper. The result is 11'09"01, an uneven collection of short films addressing the day's events and aftermath in an impressive range of tones and styles from countries as far apart as Burkina Faso and Japan.

How people react to hearing news of the attacks is a common thread connecting many of the shorts. Samira Makhmalbaf's entry depicts an Iranian teacher trying to tell Afghan refugee schoolchildren about the towers collapsing. Finding them uncomprehending, she leads them out of the school to view the smoking chimney of a brick kiln, the tallest structure in the arid landscape. From Bosnia, Danis Tanovic contributes a story about the mourners of those killed in the vicious Balkan wars of the mid-1990s. Gathering for a march in a still war-scarred and too-quiet town center, women listen to a radio announcer detailing the events in New York. After a few minutes, they take up their signs and begin their march. "What does the death of Americans mean to these people, who have lost so many of their own?" Tanovic seems to be asking.

Variations on that question are asked in two other movies, both of which are likely to be called anti-American should 11'09"01 ever play widely in the United States; the film, released in September 2002, has yet to find an American distributor. In his entry, Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, playing himself, meets with the ghosts of a Marine killed in the 1983 bombing of US barracks in Beirut and the suicide bomber who carried out the attack. In the climactic moment, the director counts up those killed by US policy in places such as Vietnam and Indonesia for the Marine and tells him, "America should spread its values; instead, it destroys civilizations." But Chahine's anger isn't callous. What upsets him, and what he questions, is how far from American ideals American leaders often deviate.

A far more jeering, detached film comes from British filmmaker Ken Loach. Narrated by Vladimir Vega, a Chilean exile living in London, Loach's contribution compares the events of Sept. 11, 1973 in Chile to Sept. 11, 2001 in the United States. A clip of President Bush saying "On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country," leads into footage of the CIA-backed coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende. It's a shameful episode, one inspired by the black-and-white worldview of Cold War-era American leaders such as Henry Kissinger and it led to the brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. But in his use of Bush's words and the juxtaposition of scenes from one Sept. 11 to another, it's hard to avoid the sense that Loach's main interest is in using the opportunity to take cheap shots at the US. It's not difficult to imagine the director thinking as he produced this film that America got its comeuppance.

In the most powerful, disturbing film in the collection, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu contributes less a narrative than a sensory experience. Beginning with a blank screen and the sound of murmured prayers, Iñarritu layers a variety of sounds and voices from that morning. A New York radio weather report, people's cries as the attack begins, thuds and rumbles, a woman calling from one of the planes — "I love you honey, there's just a small problem on the plane. Please tell my family I love them" — a man calling into a radio talk show — "I want to hit them. All of them. I want the mothers hit. I want the children hit" — all accrete into a painful aural landscape of fear, anger and love. Intermittently, there are snippets of footage of people falling from the towers, and one scene of the south tower collapsing. It ends with a view of a wall on which is written, "Does God's light guide us or blind us?"

The question is forgettable. The director's intent may have been to address it, but what demands viewers' attention in this film is not the role of faith; it's the material the director chose. Iñarritu has done something audacious — he's made art from Sept. 11. His film is not a documentary, it's not dispassionate. The careful selection and placement of each noise and voice ensures that as each amplifies the other, they remain distinct, and build to a crescendo of emotion. Similarly, the bits of footage augment the sound, and inspire conflicting and strong responses in viewers. The sight of people falling from the buildings evokes horror and grief. But there is something undeniably beautiful in the scenes as well — in one, it is possible to see a man's clothes billowing as he falls, the bright white fabric of his shirt fluttering in the air against the gray of the building wall. "There are circumstances in which beauty is an obstacle to truth," Leon Wieseltier wrote in the New Republic a few weeks after the attacks, castigating the flowery language writers such as John Updike and Adam Gopnik used in their published descriptions of Sept. 11. But in this instance, beauty reveals truth, giving dignity to the falling people who likely would never have chosen such deaths and eloquently speaking to the horrific loss of each of their lives. What Iñarritu accomplishes is a tricky balancing act between aesthetics and humanity that leaves a profound impression.

None of the other films in 11'09"01 are as good, although most are well-made and compelling. The few that fail, with the exception of Israeli director Amos Gitaï's frenetic piece set at the scene of a suicide bombing, are still watchable. By letting international filmmakers translate Sept. 11 through their own cultural background, Brigand has succeeded in producing a moving and meaningful addition to the massive collection of Sept. 11 media. That's no small feat; hopefully American audiences will get a chance to experience this work for themselves.

— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)