11' 9" 01, a film by 11 directors about the attacks on the US, has been criticised as controversial and anti-American. Michael Dwyer saw it in Toronto
A year ago this week, the Toronto International Film Festival was bisected - as its director, Piers Handling, puts it - by the shocking events of September 11th across the border in the US. Toronto is on the same time zone as New York and the early morning screenings were already under way when the first hijacked plane crashed into the World Trade Centre at 8.46 a.m.
By noon, Handling had taken the decision to close down the festival for the rest of the day. Suddenly, all the palpable excitement surrounding the world's most important film festival after Cannes - and its dozens of premières, parties and visiting actors and directors - seemed entirely irrelevant.
This year, when scheduling the two gala screenings for last Wednesday, the first anniversary of the attacks, Handling selected the first two feature films to explore those events through drama. One was Jim Simpson's film of Annie Nelson's two-hander stage play, The Guys, featuring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia in the roles played by Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins at the Peacock in Dublin last month.
The other choice proved contentious: 11' 9" 01, an omnibus film for which 11 international directors were invited to contribute a short film running 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame. The idea originated with French producer Alain Brigand, who allowed all 11 film-makers complete freedom of expression. Each was granted the same low budget, and none was allowed to communicate with the others during production.
When an advance preview of the film was held in Paris recently, the trade paper, Variety, reported that it "courts controversy" and that "several of the segments are stridently anti-American". This story was picked up by, among others, the New York Post and the Toronto Star, and the Toronto festival received protests against screening the film on September 11th.
"I feel no need to defend our choice," Handling responded. "There is no question that the films are provocative and made to encourage discussion. There is also no question that they are all measured and respectful. There is no hate in these films. Some may take issue, but arguments are healthy. People, and countries, who suppress argument are, finally, totalitarian in outlook. Anti-American? I think not."
On seeing 11' 09" 01 in Toronto this week, it is difficult to disagree with Handling. It is hardly surprising, after all, when one of the 11 directors is Ken Loach, one of the most consistently left-wing voices in world cinema.
True to form, Loach has responded by nailing the coincidence that the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile also took place on a Tuesday, September 11th - in 1973. His film is composed as a letter from a Chilean exile in London to the loved ones of the American victims of last year's events, pointing out that they and the Chileans have much in common. He goes on to target the role of the Nixon government and in particular, its secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in supporting the coup and the imposition of General Pinochet.
"Your President Nixon said he would make our economy scream," the Chilean exile writes, going on to list the appalling tortures and random executions carried out by the Pinochet regime. Loach cuts to footage of President George W. Bush last year saying, "Freedom itself is under attack," before the exile notes that exactly the same happened in Chile. He concludes his letter: "On September 11th, we will remember you. We hope you will remember us."
Loach's film is direct and lucid, unlike the incoherent ramblings of the Egyptian director, Youssef Chahine, whose film involves a conversation between a Middle East film director and the ghost of a US marine killed in Beirut in 1983. This is the structure for a heavy-handed polemic, as the director eventually recites a litany of crimes committed by the US against millions of victims in Vietnam, El Salvador, East Timor, Somalia and Iraq.
The more thoughtful offering from Danis Tanovic, the Bosnian director of No Man's Land, deals with the women who gather on the 11th of each month to mark the horrors of Srebrenica and why it will remain uppermost in their minds.
The Israeli film-maker, Amos Gitai, sets his film on September 11th in Tel Aviv, in the immediate aftermath of a suicide bombing, as a vain, stupid TV reporter blunders her way through the carnage, obstructing the emergency services, only to be taken off air when news comes in of the attacks on the Twin Towers. The abiding impression, however, is of a film-maker whose primary purpose is to deliver a vitriolic rant against the insensitivity and banality of the broadcast media.
The most pointless segment is the closing one, a wilfully obscure piece from the Japanese director, Shohei Imamura, who cobbles together a jumble of mythic symbolism and Hiroshima referencing before finally declaring, "There is no such thing as a Holy War."
Most of the other films treat the events of September 11th in terms of human responses. French director Claude Lelouch observes an immigrant in New York, a woman who is deaf and mute and remains oblivious to what is happening streets away while she writes an e-mail to her lover after a quarrel. It ends on an affirmative note of hope and reconciliation.
Actor-turned-director Sean Penn takes a similar approach, focusing on a single character, an ageing widower played by Ernest Borgnine, so consumed with grief after the death of his wife that he is unaware of what is taking place nearby until his small apartment is bathed in the blinding light of the explosions and their aftermath.
Simplicity is at the core of the engaging segments from Iran and Burkina Faso. The young Iranian director, Samira Makhmalbaf, sets her film in a small village where the local teacher tries to explain what happened in New York to children who are too young and innocent to understand. Idrissa Ouedraogo's film is a gentle comedy set in Ouaga where a boy, who can no longer afford to go school and sells papers to raise money for his ailing mother's medicine, spots a Bin Laden lookalike in the busy market and with an eye on the $25 million reward for his capture, sets out with his friends and their spears and arrows to snare their quarry.
One of the two outstanding films in the omnibus is from the Indian director, Mira Nair, who succinctly and movingly tells the cautionary true story of a Pakistani-American student feared dead after the attacks. The FBI issues a "hold and detain" order for him, which is passed on to and played up by the press, while his grieving mother obsessively campaigns for his innocence.
She is proved right when, after six months, his body is found in the ruins of the towers and it emerges that he rushed there to help in his capacity as an emergency volunteer technician. At his funeral, she states: "The word, honour, you have earned today. Perhaps if you were named Jesus or David, it would have been different."
The most experimental segment, from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the Mexican director of Amores Perros, is the most powerful. It is played out almost entirely against on a dark screen as a collage of voices build on the soundtrack - in prayer, in answering machine messages left by victims on the planes, in a growing cacophony of overlapping media reports in different languages - and the only images shown are flashes of people falling or jumping to their deaths from the towers. The impact is as jolting and chilling as it was to witness the events live on television exactly a year earlier. It ends on a question posed in Arabic and in English: "Does God's light guide us or blind us?"
11' 9" 01 will be released later this year.