11'09"01 September 11 (2002)

I've known about this film since its release and since it was partially British-financed, I half expected it to turn up during the last week amongst the various 9/11 programming.  Well it didn't, so I set it to watch off German television and with the help of a 'Sight and Sound' summary, I managed to make some sense of it -- but it just left me feeling so very, very angry, not so much regarding the event itself, but what some very well-known film-makers had made of it.

The French producer Alan Brigand came up with the wheeze that he would approach eleven leading directors from around the world and ask each of them to film a segment lasting exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame -- depicting their take on the disaster.  In order of their presentation, I will attempt to briefly summarise the results:

Young Samira Makhmalbaf  from Iran portrayed a teacher attempting to describe the day's events to a group of young Afghan refugee children who had no concept of towers or airplanes or any understandable motive to take part in a minute's silence.

French director Claude Lelouch used the occasion as a mawkish reconciliation between a deaf woman in New York who is oblivious to the events being shown on her unwatched television and her dust-covered returning lover.

Egyptian director Youssef Chahine had an actor playing him and used the occasion to dwell on the ghosts of an American soldier killed in Beirut some years before, a young arab suicide bomber, and a role-call of American-inspired deaths and invasions over the years.

From Bosnia we had the rather muted story of how a monthly march by the women of the community commemorating a 1995 massacre was not postponed by the news from New York.

The jolliest meditation came from Burkino Faso where a young schoolboy with an ailing mother thinks he has spotted Osama bin Laden, and with his pals plans how to spend the 25 million dollars reward.

Our own dear Ken Loach gave us an exiled Chilean poet meditating on the day and the same date in 1973 when President Allende was murdered by a CIA-financed military coup, starting a reign of terror in that country.

The most pretentious entry was from Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Innarritu which was nearly eleven minutes of black screen with various ambient sound occasionally showing brief shots of bodies falling from the towers and ending on a white screen with an Arabic inscription translated as 'Does God's light guide us or blind us?'

From Israel, director Amos Gitai focussed on a street reporter trying to cover a car-bombing who gradually loses her feed to the station as New York takes over the news.

Indian director Mira Nair told the purportedly true story of a Pakistani family living in New York whose son disappeared on 9/11 and whom everyone assumed was some kind of conspirator, until his remains were found at the site some six months later -- when all of a sudden the people who readily condemned the family now treated them as raising a hero.

The most maudlin story and something of an embarrassment was the only American-directed one by Sean Penn.  He showed Ernest Borgnine as a lonely old man talking to his dead wife and going on from day to day.  Living in the shadow of the Towers, when they fell, his apartment was suddenly suffused with light and his dead plants sprang into vibrant life.  No doubt some sort of allegory about hope -- but it just didn't work.

The final and weirdest section came from 76-year old Japanese director Shohei Imamura and was set at the end of World War II with ostensibly little relevance to 9/ll.  A Japanese soldier returns home thinking he's a snake and is caged; when he escapes, he slithers down to the river and drowns.  Yeah, war is hell.

With friends like these, you don't need enemies.