In the aftermath of the tragedies on September 11, 2001, the French film company Studio Canal called upon a group of filmmakers, representing various regions of the world, to address the scope of the situation in however broad or intimate a context as they saw fit. The one guideline they were given was that no one film could exceed 11 minutes, nine seconds, and one frame. The resulting omnibus film, 11'09"01, showed at festivals around the world the following year and garnered a theatrical release in 2003. Each filmmaker's entry takes a different approach: French director Claude Lelouch tells the tale of a World Trade Center tour guide who is on the verge of a breakup with his deaf girlfriend when the terrorist attacks hit; similarly, Hollywood actor-director Sean Penn chronicles the lonely existence of an old man living not far from the Twin Towers. Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and British social realist filmmaker Ken Loach created the most controversy with their entries, which, respectively, address the points-of-view of a suicide bomber and of a Chilean who recalls the brutal coup funded by the United States in his country on September 11, 1973. Alejandro González Iñárritu's piece is the most abstract, taking images from television on the day of the attacks and cutting them with selected bursts of sound. Samira Makhmalbaf, Danis Tanovic, and Idrissa Ouedraogo all tell small-scale stories of the effects of the attacks on tiny villages in Iran, Serbia, and Burkina Faso, respectively. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
Review
11'09"01 - September 11 proves that even the most talented and insightful artists are not always up to the task at hand. Not that these filmmakers, left to their own devices, would necessarily have tried to address the events of that tragic day, particularly such a short time after the fact. But French producer Alain Brigand asked them, and how many artists would turn down such a challenge? The most useless responses range from too fey and oblique (Sean Penn's excessively modest weepie, starring Ernest Borgnine; Claude Lelouch's engagingly staged, but mildly inappropriate romantic comedy) to too bombastically immediate (Alejandro González Iñárritu's borderline-offensive docu-trauma). Other filmmakers (Danis Tanovic, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Amos Gitai) attempt to link the tragedy to their own countries' ongoing troubles, with mixed results. Gitai's formal rigor yields the most compelling of these segments. To dismiss the entire work as anti-American, as some have done, is wrongly reductive. Most of these filmmakers do have something valuable to say, and even those that are most critical of America's perceived self-interest couch their criticisms with sympathy for the victims of the terrorist attack. That said, Youssef Chahine's crude, self-congratulatory ghost story is still fairly insulting, despite its feeble effort at balance. However, Ken Loach's diatribe about U.S. involvement in Chile's own September 11 tragedy (voiced by Vladimir Vega) is harsh, but stated simply, powerfully, and undeniably. Samira Makhmalbaf offers a bittersweet, humanistic tale of a teacher trying to convey the scale of the tragedy to a class of Afghan refugee children. Mira Nair presents a useful, if somewhat obvious, true tale of a Muslim-American hero briefly mistaken for a terrorist. Perhaps Japanese master Shohei Imamura had the canniest approach. His dour segment's connection to the events of 9/11 is so tenuous that he could never be accused of crassness or insensitivity. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
