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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