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11'09"01: September 11

2002, Movie, NR, 134 mins

11'09"01: September 11: Review

11'09
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Eleven internationally renowned directors, 11 short films, 11 unique points of view. Unlike filmmakers who tried to record objectively the events of Sept. 11, 2001, French producer Alain Brigand was more interested in capturing their impact on a select group of filmmakers. Brigand granted his directors complete freedom of expression, with the condition that each film run exactly 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame. Despite this entirely arbitrary constraint, the filmmakers' attempts come to terms with a recent catastrophe of indeterminate meaning but global consequences are often fascinating. In the young Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf's film — one of the best — a youthful schoolteacher (Maryam Karimi) tries to explain the attacks to a group of Afghan refugee children on the Iran-Afghanistan border. In order to understand the enormity of the events, the children stand at the foot of a towering smokestack, a chilling echo of the burning World Trade Center and an ominous foreshadowing of what's to come. Burkinabe filmmaker Idrissa Ouedrago similarly addresses repercussions in developing nations with a lighthearted story of a poor newspaper boy who thinks he's spotted Osama bin Laden at a local market, and hopes to use the $25 million bounty to help his sick mother. Japanese director Shoei Imamura takes on the notion of holy war with a bizarre WWII parable about a soldier who, after witnessing the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese army on mainland China, decides he'd rather be a snake than a human being. Egypt's Youssef Chahine finds the roots of terrorism in U.S. foreign policy and a pervasive sense of powerlessness among Third World countries — hardly great cinema, but provocative material — while England's Ken Loach urges us to remember the 1973 U.S.-backed military coup that ended in Chilean President Salvador Allende's "suicide" on another Sept. 11. Alejandro Gonazalez Iñarritu's film is the most abstract, but the hardest hitting. Set to the actual sounds of the unfolding horror, a pitch-black screen is repeatedly shattered by the jolting images of bodies falling from the World Trade Center. Unsurprisingly, the two weakest films subordinate the collapse of the towers to trite narratives. The couple in Claude Lelouch's trivial short find their dying relationship rekindled when the man is nearly killed, while the delusional widower (Ernest Borgnine) of Sean Penn's fantasy is bathed in the cold light of day when the South Tower suddenly disappears. In a matter of minutes, Lelouch and Penn reduce the tragedy of September 11 to a mere plot point. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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