From tragedy to ‘Rebirth’

Tim, a New York City firefighter, knew instinctively when his co-worker and best friend, Terry, cocked his head and wordlessly indicated that he was heading into a flaming World Trade Center tower that it was the last time he would see him.

Ling, who was burned in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, could do little for months afterward but sit on the couch and watch “Murder, She Wrote.” Basically, “here’s this little old lady who somehow figures everything out,” she says was her reaction to the show, and it brought her a strange comfort.

Tanya, who was engaged to a firefighter, realized that she would never see her lover again when his co-workers called and offered to bring over food on the afternoon of the tragedy, a gesture she couldn’t understand at first.

They’re three of the five subjects who appear in Jim Whitaker’s “Rebirth,” an emotionally harrowing tale of the evolution of both the site of the 9/11 attacks and the people affected by the events. The documentary was one of the quiet discoveries of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it will be rolled out on television and in movie theaters this year before finding a permanent home at the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan.

At a friend’s wedding in New York several weeks after the attacks, Whitaker, then an executive at Hollywood production company Imagine Entertainment, noticed a group of Wall Streeters crying in the corner. He’d never directed a documentary before, but he felt moved to do something. He and cinematographer Tom Lappin went about placing 14 still cameras in various spots above the Ground Zero site and set them to snap a shot every five minutes, every day — for seven years.

Meanwhile, Whitaker and his producing partners began talking to family-therapy groups and scouring newspaper stories for ideal subjects. He eventually chose nine people (the four not in the film will appear in outtakes at the museum) and once a year, usually around Sept. 11, he met with them for on-camera interviews. For as much as five or six hours, they talked about their emotional state of mind and their highs and lows over the previous year.

The group is diverse — it includes Ling, a fiftysomething Chinese immigrant who was high in one tower when a plane hit; Nick, a 15-year-old teenager who lost his mother; and Brian, an outer-borough construction worker who lost his brother — but what they all have in common is a striking amount of self-awareness and honesty.

“One of the first things I said to them is that I’m not interested in a quote like a journalist would be,” Whitaker said. “I’m more interested in the thoughts you have when you’re taking a shower in the morning.”

Whitaker says that although some of the subjects were too emotionally spent to go through the interviews — one even dropped out early in the process — most relished the opportunity to share their experiences, however trying; at a Sundance screening, Tim described the years of conversation with Whitaker as a kind of therapy. (The film selectively uses subjects’ last names but focuses on their first names, the effect of which is to make viewers feel even more intimately acquainted with them.)

Despite the film’s personal feel, Whitaker and his team tried to make the cameras seem as unobtrusive as possible. The team used only natural light in outside shots, for instance, and kept the cameras at a distance, at least in the early years of the project. “Our goal was to make them feel totally comfortable, even if it meant our shots were a little grainy and out of focus sometimes,” Lappin said.

But what really distinguishes “Rebirth” from all the Sept. 11 films made both inside and outside of Hollywood is that, rather than simply provide a snapshot of victims, Whitaker follows his subjects over seven years, so that viewers can follow their physical and psychological changes in a kind of emotional time-lapse. (The process mirrors actual time-lapse footage of the Ground Zero site razed and built up, which is intercut between the interviews.)

Tim, for instance, moves to Washington, D.C., to work for the Department of Homeland Security. Ling makes a slow physical and emotional recovery rife with setbacks. Tanya tentatively enters a relationship with another man.

In the process, “Rebirth” explores not only a particular American tragedy but the grieving and healing process generally.

“In many ways this is about experience of 9/11, but it’s also about the universal experience of loss,” Whitaker said. “I wanted people to intimately understand this subject by connecting it to their own experience and then understanding their own loss and recovery.”

The five subjects of the film came together in Park City, Utah, most meeting for the first time at the film festival. Tim stood up at a screening and described the process of both the years of interviews and the reunion itself. “We all came around in a circle,” he said.

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com