11’09″01 is an omnibus film about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Eleven filmmakers from around the world each made a short film about the events of 9/11; each film is exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds, plus one frame long. Nearly every section is powerful, or at least interesting; but the film does not have a distributor in the USA, because it is considered to be too anti-American. Though no more so, I would argue, than the events warrant. Among the most powerful sections of the film were: Samira Makhmalbaf’s portrait of Afghani schoolchildren exiled in Iran, who are unable to comprehend an event that will nonetheless have extreme consequences for them; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s extraordinary sound collage (with only a few images appearing on an otherwise blank screen) of the fall of the Towers; Mira Nair’s story about a Pakistani woman in New York whose son has been killed trying to rescue people from the Towers, but who is wrongly suspected by the FBI of being a terrorist; Amos Gitai’s single-take depiction of a terrorist bombing in Israel; and Shohei Imamura’s oblique fable of a war veteran who comes back home transformed into a snake. Denis Tanovic reminds us that September 11 is also the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacure in the Bosnian war; Ken Loach memorializes September 11, 1973, the day that Salvador Allende’s government in Chile was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup. The one American entry, directed by Sean Penn, is kind of sappy and dumb in terms of its concept, but it is redeemed by the wondrousness of 11 minutes of closeups of an elderly Ernest Borgnine.
11’09″01
11’09″01 is an omnibus film about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Eleven filmmakers from around the world each made a short film about the events of 9/11; each film is exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds, plus one frame long. Nearly every section is powerful, or at least interesting; but the film does not have a distributor in the USA, because it is considered to be too anti-American. Though no more so, I would argue, than the events warrant. Among the most powerful sections of the film were: Samira Makhmalbaf’s portrait of Afghani schoolchildren exiled in Iran, who are unable to comprehend an event that will nonetheless have extreme consequences for them; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s extraordinary sound collage (with only a few images appearing on an otherwise blank screen) of the fall of the Towers; Mira Nair’s story about a Pakistani woman in New York whose son has been killed trying to rescue people from the Towers, but who is wrongly suspected by the FBI of being a terrorist; Amos Gitai’s single-take depiction of a terrorist bombing in Israel; and Shohei Imamura’s oblique fable of a war veteran who comes back home transformed into a snake. Denis Tanovic reminds us that September 11 is also the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacure in the Bosnian war; Ken Loach memorializes September 11, 1973, the day that Salvador Allende’s government in Chile was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup. The one American entry, directed by Sean Penn, is kind of sappy and dumb in terms of its concept, but it is redeemed by the wondrousness of 11 minutes of closeups of an elderly Ernest Borgnine.