The film that kicked up the dust at Venice is now in wide release in Paris, the one which invited 11 different directors to present 11 minute 9 second 01 frame shorts about Sept 11.
You've already heard that some of these pieces grate on American viewers, and that's probably because that is how you make "news" out of a heterogenous collection of sensitive, passionate films.
Here's what they were about (I don't remember all the director's name, save a few):
Iran - On the morning of September 11th a schoolteacher out in the dry, bare countryside tries to round up her young students (already working hard at a construction site at 8am) for the day's lesson. She tries to tell them what has happened in the USA, two towers have fallen down. The children find it impossible to imagine, and find themselves distracted by theology. "God does not kill people like that. It could not have been God that did it," one says. Another answers, "Yes he does; it is so he can make new people."
France - A deaf woman has a spat with her lover on the morning before she is to depart him and New York for home. He leaves the house, she sits in her silent world all the morning long, composing her angry goodbye letter. He comes back, covered in soot. He asks, crying, "Didn't you see the television?"
Egypt - The controversial one but cast in a striking classical narrative, where the author/director is visited by the ghost of an American soldier from the Beirut bombing--his muse, on the day he returns shellshocked to Egypt from a project in New York on 9/12.They debate politics, and visit a Palestinian bomber's family and also the ghost of the bomber himself. The soldier talks about his innocence, and the young Lebanese woman he loved. The director counts off the lives lost in American campaigns of the last 50 years, such as civilians killed during the Vietnam War or victims of US puppet regimes during the Cold War. Why shouldn't civilians be targets, he says, if they are the voters in a democracy that support oppression?
Bosnia - The widows of Srebrenica make their protest for justice every 11th, not that anyone cares much about them, especially on this awful September 11th. They march this time not in spite of the events but because of it, to remember their husbands and all the victims.
Burkina-Faso - A kid, living in poverty and with his mother dying, must drop out of school and sell papers to support himself. On the cover of the paper: "$25 million bounty on Bin Laden". He and his chums go chasing foolishly after some guy who looks like Bin Laden; imagine what good they could do with that money, they say.
UK - A victim of the US-orchestrated coup against the democratically elected communist President Allende of Chile in 1973 recalls the horrors. Kissinger greeting Pinochet after his henchman had slaughtered more than 30,000 civilians. Also a September 11th to remember.
Mexico - A sincere film that takes on the shock of the events themselves. Pitch black screen with first the sounds of murmur, chants or perhaps indigenous peoples' prayers; a rising intensity of the sound over a period of minutes, then suddenly flashes of imagery: bodies falling from the towers. Black screen, the sound of thuds, a punctuation of blindingly bright falling bodies. Like the rining telephone on the soundtrack of Kubrick's Apocaplypse Now, the frenzy rises as we hear furious callers into radio shows demanding blood and hear the last words of victims recorded on answering machines.
Israel - A bomb has just exploded on a crowded street and emergency responders swing into action. First a close up a soldier screaming into his radio and defusing a bomb, trying to maintain order. Then a med who arrives and starts directing the chaos. The scene starts filling up with onlookers, a woman on rollerblades, meds, soldiers, everything. Then the reporter shows up, absurd and vain, preening in front of her camera and bringing it live. Jostled around she's trying to get the story, get in the way, and at the same time convince the station to run her feed. They bump her -- bigger news unfolding in New York. At which point she kicks up an absurd meta-narrative stream of historical citations from 9/11s past: Churchill meets Roosevelt, 1944, to divide up fallen Germany...etc. This aspect I found most bizarre and perhaps my French failed me (soundtrack was in Hebrew with French subtitles).
India - Mira Nair zooms in on a Brooklyn muslim family who's son goes missing on 9/11, gets investigated for being a terrorist, and is finally discovered at the site: he must have gone down there to help, and died. A hero, but the racist charge of terrorism stings.
USA - Sean Penn's sentimental piece places a huge, pitiable Ernest Borgnine in a dark, one room hovel talking to the place where his now dead wife used to sleep. Reminded me of Aaronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. On 9/11, the towers come down and at that moment, sunlight finally streams into his dank apartment. The rays magically revive a dead rose plant, and the man in tears finally wakes from his sleepwalk, realizing that his wife is dead and gone.
Japan - A young man returned from WW2 slithers around like a serpent, gone insane from what he had seen in the war. The village is mystified, but the filmmaker flashes back to his moment of cowardice and loss-of-face during the war, and we know that war is always a miserable thing.
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One comment: the majority of films are critical of something American: not the American response to 9/11 per se. They sympathize with the grief. But what shocks them is massive ignorance of the mourners -- these special people act as if nobody suffers, as if nobody has died, and as if nobody could possibly dislike the Americans for their good and honest works in the world. Excepting the French and Mexican films, that treat the disaster itself as a shocking event, nearly every other film highlights dimensions of world suffering and misery that go essentially un-noticed in America. Some take the further step of accusing American of propagating horrors, like in Chile.
Striking was the US take: intensely sentimental, interior, personal, empty. Critical, in a way, by saying that the disaster was a kind of wake up call. But at the same time ignorant of context, politics, consequences, suffering. And in a way this is true. In America, we have not thought about the attack as having context. There is not larger world of facts -- there is a pain, and the enemy that caused it. So there is no scope for examining how American policy or other world events could turn people against us; it is simply a question of evil.
Posted by amol at September 29, 2002 11:27 PM