Anguish Speaks a Universal Tongue

Whoever said “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” couldn’t have foreseen some of the early reactions to “11’09”01,” in which 11 high-profile international filmmakers were given carte blanche to respond to the events of Sept. 11.

The title, which stems from the date of the attacks as it is written in much of the world--with the day before the month--also describes the project’s lone constraint.

Each of the individual films had to clock in at precisely 11 minutes 9 seconds and one frame, a challenge 22-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf of Iran, whose segment kicks off the collection, likens to that of “a mother trying to dictate the exact weight and height of her newborn before it exits the womb.”

The French-financed omnibus production will premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 6 (the festival itself begins Thursday) and will be shown at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 11, the same day the film opens in theaters throughout France. Negotiations for American distribution of the film are underway.

Participants, none of whom had any idea of what the others were up to, range from veteran actor Ernest Borgnine under the direction of Sean Penn to two-time Palme d’Or winner Shohei Imamura of Japan to nonprofessional young actors in the poorer enclaves of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Tehran. There also are films by Israeli, Egyptian and Bosnian filmmakers among many others. Although the attack on the Pentagon is referenced in two of the segments, events in New York are the primary focus.

Early news reports last week described some of the segments of the film as “anti-American” in tone. Interviewed recently in Paris, five of the film’s directors denied the bias, noting instead that they hoped to put the terrorist attacks in a more global context and bring attention to injustice beyond U.S. borders.

For example, the 11th day of September has held wrenching power for Chile and neighboring countries since 1973. The film segment by England’s Ken Loach reminds viewers that Henry Kissinger, then head of the National Security Council, and then-President Richard Nixon endorsed Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s lethal coup d’etat against Chile’s President Salvador Allende staged on, of all dates, Sept. 11.

Expressing boundless sympathy for the people of New York, Loach’s narrator, a Chilean in exile in London, recounts that 30,000 of his countrymen perished, victims of torture and murder.

Some may think this sort of history lesson is uncalled for given the topic at hand, and others may believe that pointed reflection on political meddling is precisely what’s needed in light of current events.

The project’s most contested segment comes from Egypt’s Youssef Chahine, who includes a conversation with the ghost of an American Marine killed in Lebanon.

Some will doubtless argue that Chahine has chosen the wrong forum in which to suggest--without actually condoning their murderous logic--that Palestinian suicide bombers believe their actions to be justified.

Chahine, born in Alexandria in 1926, studied in the late 1940s at the Pasadena Playhouse. His wide-ranging, politically muddled segment reflects a man whose early, still-abiding love for America has been sorely tested by American foreign policy.

India’s Mira Nair (“Monsoon Wedding”) tells a true story of horribly misguided racism. Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu (“Amores Perros”) uses deft sound design and a handful of images to conjure a guided meditation through the arc of emotions that burst forth on Sept. 11.

In Penn’s segment, Borgnine stars, solo, as a cheerful man who putters around his Manhattan apartment in a state of denial until a strange spell is broken on the morning of Sept. 11.

Imamura provides the only period piece in the collection. A demobilized Japanese soldier at the end of WWII believes himself to be a snake; having seen the horrors of “Holy War” he can’t abide the company of men.

One hopeful undercurrent emerges most consistently in the films’ diverse segments: That Americans and their elected officials realize that the sheer horror of what befell the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, is felt the world over because people and nations across the globe have themselves been the victims of violence as unfair as it is devastating.

Danis Tanovic, a 33-year-old Bosnian, won the screenplay award at Cannes last year and the foreign-language Oscar for “No Man’s Land.” His segment centers on a young Bosnian widow in exile for whom the number 11 is an ever-present wound that refuses to heal.

On the 11th day of every month, the women whose men were slaughtered in Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, hold commemorative vigils in their town squares.

“The outside world doesn’t particularly care that some 10,000 people were killed there that one day,” Tanovic says, adding, “People who survive tragedies stay frozen in time. So it is not something that happened only to Bosnians--it happened to everybody.”

Tanovic’s point is that people in Srebrenica were supposed to be safe, just as people going to work in the World Trade Center believed themselves to be safe.

Addressing the dilemma of Bosnian women who not only lost their loved ones but also cannot return to the homes Serbs appropriated, Tanovic reluctantly spells out in conversation a tangent his film subtly implies: “Imagine that the New York women whose husbands were killed in the twin towers couldn’t return to their homes because members of Al Qaeda were living there.”

Israel’s Amos Gitai (“Kippur”), a filmmaker who was shaped by his military experiences, says of his segment: “I made an uninterrupted 11-minute continuous take with very complicated choreography because on the evening news, everything’s chopped up like hamburger into little individual shots.”

On a Tel Aviv street, a car bomb explodes. People appear to be dead and injured. Ambulances and medics arrive, as well as an Israeli TV crew whose determined reporter struggles to get the facts, only to be told by her editor that a bombing in Israel doesn’t merit air time because “something more important, a much bigger story” is unfolding in New York.

With two well-received features under her belt (“The Apple,” “Blackboards”), Makhmalbaf shot in an Afghan refugee community near Tehran.

“I chose children because I wanted to show their innocent point of view,” she says. A teacher instructs her class to observe a minute of silence for the dead in New York, but her adorable charges are too young to understand what that means. Until, that is, she has them gaze at the imposing chimney of the local brick kiln and imagine what it would be like to have it crumble on their heads.

Her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, has been making movies for 20 years, including “Kandahar,” which was shown in competition at Cannes in May 2001 but aroused scant interest among North American distributors until its eponymous city became news.

“George W. Bush saw it twice!” Samira Makhmalbaf exclaims, calling the abrupt interest in “Kandahar” after Sept. 11 “a sad thing. While the president was watching the film, we were biting our nails wondering if the outcome would be good or bad for Afghanistan,” she says of the country that shares a border and--with a few minor differences--a language, with Iran.

“Until last September, nobody wanted to know where Afghanistan is or who are the people who live there. It’s too convenient to call them all terrorists.”

Although Samira Makhmalbaf’s 11 minutes are marbled with bittersweet humor--two children conclude that Allah couldn’t have had a part in the attacks because “God doesn’t own airplanes”--Africa’s Idrissa Ouedraogo is the only writer-director to have found the near-miraculous comedy in a Sept. 11-related situation.

Five poor schoolboys in Burkina Faso’s capital city of Ouagadougou learn there’s a $25-million reward for Osama bin Laden. Certain they’ve spotted him in their hometown, the industrious lads are continually thwarted in their efforts to capture the world’s most wanted man.

Ouedraogo, who was born in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) in 1954, says Africa has changed by leaps and bounds in just the past 10 to 15 years. “Satellite television, CNN, etc. have brought us so much of the outside world. Africa doesn’t have enough images of itself, so images from elsewhere are infiltrating.”

Ouedraogo notes, “The thing about the attacks on the World Trade Center is that no matter how inexperienced the cameraman holding the video camera, the images have enormous power. Images unleash emotions, but that’s not enough. You have to think about them and explore the cultural implications.”

French director Claude Lelouch was in his editing room on Sept 11. “My son called at 3 p.m. and told me to turn on the TV,” Lelouch said in an earlier interview about his film segment. “It was the deepest shock I’ve experienced in my 64 years on Earth, and I had the Gestapo after me during WWII.”

Lelouch, who won the Palme d’Or and two Oscars for 1966’s “A Man and a Woman” and whose 37th feature “And Now ... Ladies and Gentlemen,” starring Jeremy Irons, will soon be released in the U.S., built a Manhattan loft on a Paris soundstage to tell the story of a Franco-American couple who communicate via sign language. Where Makhmalbaf’s teacher tries to achieve one minute of silence in honor of the victims, Lelouch provides 11.

Be they set in New York or elsewhere, “11’09”01’s” segments demonstrate that few people anywhere recover quickly from major trauma. In the hands of talented directors, that is meant to be food for thought rather than food for controversy.

Note: Profits from “11’09”01” will be donated to the charity Handicap International, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.