Alternative visions of September 11

Episodes directed by Samira Makhmalbaf, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Sean
Penn, Denis Tanovic, Mira Nair, Shohei Imamura, Amos Gitai, Youssef Chahine,
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Idrissa Ouedrago

Now showing at the Nova and Cinema Europa, Melbourne; opens November
28 at the Dendy Opera Quays and Palace Academy, Paddington, Sydney; opens
December 5 at Dendy cinemas, Brisbane

REVIEW BY MELANIE SJOBERG

 Do you recall what you were doing when the planes crashed into
the World Trade Center towers in New York on September 11, 2001?

 I remember waking at 6am to the radio news and laying in stunned
disbelief as the words vibrated around my half-dreaming mind. That working
day, few people were far away from a TV or radio as they tried to comprehend
the meaning of that terrible event.

 To make 11'09"01 September 11, 11 renowned directors were asked
by artistic director Alain Brigand to each create a film — lasting 11 minutes,
nine seconds and one frame — on the theme of 9/11.

 Afghan children scuttling through the rubble of a refugee camp
and a teacher straining to teach in a makeshift classroom are the images
that Samira Makhmalbaf of Iran offers to demonstrate that some people's
lives are irretrievably damaged by war and will continue that way with
the "war on terror" that followed 9/11.

 Ken Loach tells the story of the Vega family, refugees from the
US-backed coup in Chile of September 11, 1973. Loach counterposes scenes
of US President George Bush, proclaiming the 9/11 attacks as "the greatest
ever attack on freedom", to footage of Henry Kissinger endorsing the military
brutality and a massacre of 30,000 Chileans by Augusto Pinochet.

 The proclamation of the USAPATRIOT Act underlines Indian filmmaker
Mira Nair's story of racism. The superficiality of Bush's declaration of
good and evil is exposed in her story of a young Pakistani Muslim who is
eventually declared a hero by the US.

 Idrissa Ouedrago provides a delightful sketch in innocence and
idealism, a village children in Burkina Faso try to capture Osama bin Laden
after deciding they need the reward money for medicine to save a sick mother.

 The short-film style of 11'09"01 is unusual, but it shifts the
focus away from the US-dominated world-view we are bombarded with by the
likes of CNN and the Australian commercial mass media. These vignettes
concentrate on the people who were unaware of this "great event" or perhaps
viewed the tragedy in New York through the prism of their own life experiences.

From Green Left Weekly, November 27, 2002.

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From GLW issue 518