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On this first anniversary of that terrible day last September, the omnibus
work 11'09"01 arrives at the Toronto International Film Festival
as both a prod to the conscience and a quest for understanding.
The images and sounds in this monumental achievement are of pain that
still aches, of anger that still seethes, of events that still can't be
believed. But above all, they are of questions still being asked.
Featuring the work of 11 international directors, some of who will be
attending tonight's gala North American premiere at Roy Thomson Hall,
11'09"01 has acquired a measure of advance controversy due to inaccurate
reports that it contains "anti-American" comments.
Nothing could be further from the truth, unless you define "anti-American"
as anything other than the jingoistic waving of the Stars and Stripes.
11'09"01 isn't anti-American; it's anti-ignorance. It seeks to answer
the "why?" question that was on the minds and lips of many last
Sept. 11, when the sky literally fell in on America's cherished notions
of freedom, safety and security- notions that have long been abandoned
in many other parts of the globe. The film does so with passion, intelligence
and genuine empathy- something much more vital than sympathy- for a planet
that seems to be spinning off its axis.
To the vast world outside the United States, there are as many reasons
to resent and envy Americans as there are to express sorrow to them in
times of national tragedy. This collection of short films, each one symbolically
timed at exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame, came from a request
by artistic producer Alain Brigand of France that filmmakers "commit
their subjective conscience" to the topic of Sept. 11.
They were allowed complete freedom of expression, and many of the directors
seized the occasion to remind the world- not just Americans- that terror
and grief know no national boundaries.
Israel's Amos Gitaï sets his views in the midst of a Sept. 11 suicide
bombing in Tel Aviv, a terribly familiar scene in a city and country enduring
an intifada without end. As rescue workers assist the wounded and remove
the dead, a TV newswoman and her crew show up to report the event. But
as she attempts to broadcast live from the scene, she's informed by her
office that the local tragedy won't be making the newscast because "something
really, really serious has happened in New York."
The newswoman can't believe her ears. "Who gives a s-t about New
York?" she cries. "Are you crazy?"
Egyptian director Youssef Chahine delves into memory to make a similar
point. It follows an elderly filmmaker- likely representing the 76-year-old
Chahine- on a symbolic journey, as he attempts to make sense of the terror
attacks on the World Trade Center. He stands on a beach, where he is visited
by the ghost of a U.S. marine, killed in a 1983 terrorist attack in Lebanon.
He travels to the home of a Palestine suicide bomber, just as a bomb-laden
youth is setting out on his fearful mission. The youth's father angrily
decries U.S. support of Israel, saying, "That fool Bush lets them
decide who the terrorists are."
Almost as pointed are the shorts by Bosnia's Danis Tanovic (No Man's Land)
and England's Ken Loach, who note that the 11th day of the month means
something very different in other parts of the world. In Bosnia, the widows
and daughters of the 7,000 victims of the Srebrenica massacre of July
11, 1995, gather and march in public squares on the 11th of every month,
bearing silent witness to their dead. When news breaks on Sept. 11 of
the attacks in America, the women briefly considered suspending that day's
march, until one of them observes that their pain is now shared: "We
have to demonstrate, for them and for us." Loach is even more direct,
recalling that Sept. 11, 1973, was the day the Americans help depose Chile's
accused dictator President Salvador Allende.
Iran's Samira Makhmalbaf and Burkina Faso's Idrissa Ouedraogo demonstrate
how difficult it is to explain a foreign tragedy to people who have lived
their entire lives in pain and deprivation. Makhmalbaf takes us inside
the classroom of a young schoolteacher who tries with difficulty to silence
young Afghan refugees who are fearful of American bombs that may soon
rain from above, but who haven't the slightest idea of why it will happen.
The children have never seen a skyscraper and can't imagine the World
Trade Center; the teacher marches the tots outside to stare at a smokestack,
so they might gain a glimmer of understanding.
Ouedraogo's equally subtle short uses bittersweet comedy for a story of
a young boy who can't afford schoolbooks or medicine for his ailing mother,
and who hopes to reap a reward by capturing terrorist leader Osama bin
Laden- who just might be hiding in the fruit stands down at the local
market.
'... it is impossible to watch it without feeling a lump in the throat,
or a nod of agreement with the final statement, printed in Arabic and
English: "Does God's light guide us or blind us?"'
11'09"01 travels to New York for three vastly different approaches
to the idea of hometown grief. India's Mira Nair re-enacts the true story
of a Pakistani-American police cadet who was killed while attempting to
rescue people at the WTC, but considered a possible terror suspect for
weeks after the attack, before being hailed as a hero once the truth was
known. The cadet's bereaved mother stands over his casket asking, "Is
this the price you pay for raising a compassionate human being?
American Sean Penn conscripts fellow actor Ernest Borgnine for a devastating
personal account of a widowed pensioner, literally living in the shadow
of the World Trade Center, who begins each day by arranging his late wife's
clothes on their bed. He curses the lack of sunlight for her precious
flowers. When the twin towers suddenly fall one morning, the shadows swiftly
vanishing from his building, the pensioner knows only the joy of sudden
light without realizing the darkness that brought it on.
France's Claude Lelouch also addresses ignorance in emotional terms, in
the story of a deaf and mute New York woman whose life seems over because
she's losing her live-in boyfriend: "The end of a relationship is
the end of the world." She sits at her table and pens a farewell
note to him on Sept. 11, unaware of the disaster unfolding a few blocks
away, and on her TV in the other room.
The most powerful of the shorts is deceptively the most simple. Mexico's
Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu (Amores Perros) keep
the screen entirely black, interrupting it every 30 seconds or so with
retina-assaulting bursts of the World Trade Center carnage. The soundtrack
is an audio collage, mixing news reports of the tragedy with cell-phone
calls and e-mails from victims on the aircraft and in the tower, finally
fading to a cacophony of Arab voices. Much of the impact is subliminal,
and it is impossible to watch it without feeling a lump in the throat,
or a nod of agreement with the final statement, printed in Arabic and
English: "Does God's light guide us or blind us?"
The statement is one of two that could stand as the essential messages
of 11'09"01. The other is from Japan's Shohei Imamura, whose highly
symbolic short recalls the Hiroshima bombing, and the effect it had on
a shattered war veteran who returned home convinced that he had turned
into a snake, since the bomb had destroyed any human feelings he had.
Imamura's short, and the film, ends with the words: "There is no
holy war."
There is, however, just one planet Earth, spinning in a darkness that
seems all the gloomier on this saddest of days. It's a darkness that 11'09"01
masterfully seeks to penetrate, using wisdom and understanding rather
than rhetoric and bombs
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