11′09″01
11′09′’01 - September 11 bills itself as various cultures’ responses to the 9/11 tragedy, but it works better if you stop trying to compare everyone’s view on the attacks and just enjoy it as a collection of foreign short films.
Highlights of the collection include a Chilean man’s open letter to the United States drawing the parallel between September 11th 2001 and the CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende on September 11th 1973, also a Tuesday. Unlike others who have made this connection, most notably Noam Chomsky, segment director Ken Loach makes no attempt to sneer at the 2001 attacks as deserved comeuppance, but rather portrays the two incidents as genuine tragedies worthy of grief. (Many critics have been less sympathetic than I to Loach on this point.)
Mira Nair’s segment on Pakistani immigrants in New York City whose son disappears after 9/11 has drawn less critical discussion, probably because it’s far less “arty” than the rest of the series, but its story and cast make it totally worthwhile. Sean Penn’s contribution makes less sense than it probably should, but is carried by Ernest Borgnine’s unflinching portrayal of a grieving widower. Claude Lelouch’s piece on a deaf woman planning to leave her boyfriend who works as a tour guide in the World Trade Center makes no large point, but succeeds in its emotion - likewise Idrissa Ouedraogo’s on boys in Burkina Faso who scheme to claim the bounty on Osama bin Laden’s head.
Roger Ebert called Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s segment the best, and in fact Inarritu’s name was the reason I rented the DVD, but I thought it was annoyingly padded to fill the required 11 minutes, 9 seconds, and 1 frame - maybe three minutes of it were necessary.
Technical quibbles: the DVD is full-screen, but makes no attempt at pan-and-scan - if something important is happening on the right side of the screen, you don’t see it, and these omissions include the name and home country of every segment’s director. The segments are effectively titled with the country they supposedly represent, but I would argue that Loach’s segment is more about Chile than the UK, Nair’s is more about Pakistan or the US than India, and Lelouch’s is more about the US than France.
Those complaints aside, I recommend the collection, which certainly need not be watched all at once, and I look forward to a proper DVD release.