11'09''01

Yesterday I watched those 11 short films, probably for the 6th time since their release. Although I already own a copy of the DVD (the most expensive DVD I ever bought), I couldn't resist a public screening that took place where I live. Feeling the reaction of the audience, and listening to their different interpretations, is as important as watching the films themsevles in my opinion. I had some comments on individual segments, and here they are, starting with the more thought provoking:

1. Shohei Imamura (Japan): This is the only segment that didn't mention September the 11th at all. I believe it is inspired by Kafka's Metamorphosis, only with a Japanese soldier turning into a human snake after returning back to his village shortly before the end of World War II. It is a condensed cinematic portrait of how war degrades human beings, with a conclusion stating that war can never be holy. Imamura is condemning war in all shapes and forms, and in that regard I think he equates terrorism with conventional war.

2. Sean Penn (USA): Probably the most controversial segment, especially among American audience. The old lonely American man whose alram clock didn't go off on the morning of September the 11th(CIA? FBI? NSA? you name it). He was only awakened by the sun light coming through his window for the first time as one of the towers shadowing the sun collapsed. His wife's flowers suddenly flourished due to the light filling the room, but that light also brought him the sad truth: he is all alone and his wife was still alive only in his imagination. Those mixed emotions at the end of the segment are probably the way Penn feels about the attacks on that day. A lot of tears were shed on the loss of innocent lives, but also that incident was supposed to enlight Americans in a way. Aside from all the connotations, the script and cinematography are probably the best, in my opinion, compared to the other segments.

3. Ken Loach(United Kingdom): The way Loach links September the 11th 1973 in Chile and that same day of 2001 in the US is the key to to his film. He mourns those who died on 2001, while reminding the American public of the 30,000 who were killed in Chile 28 years earlier as a result of the coup against the democratically elected president Salvador Allende and his leftist government. The coup led by one of the most notorious war criminals in modern history, Augusto Pinochet, was financed and planned by the CIA. Ken Loach quotes George W. Bush saying that the attacks of September the 11th were against "freedom", and then he dives with his camera 28 years back in history through gruesome documentary footage of bombings, torture, killings, and Henry Kissinger congratulating Pinochet on his new pro-America regime. Loach's film is mainly based on edited documentary footage, but still it's one of the most powerful and enlightling, especially to those who actually believe in the American efforts to democratize the Arab world.

4. Danis Tanovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina): We now move to another human tragedy: the refugees of the Bosnian war. A group of Bosnian refugees, mostly women, who demonstrate on the 11th of each month in the main square of their village. One of them still refuses to unpack her boxes, believing that she will be back home soon. On September the 11th, and as they are getting ready for their monthly demonstration, they hear the news on the radio. After some reluctance, they go on with their silent sad demonstration, both for their own cause and for the victims killed in the US. It is a clear message to all human beings suffering from all kinds of injustices: don't put your resistence on hold only because the US decided to turn the whole world into a chessboard for its game against terrorism.

5. Claude Lelouche (France): A romantic relationship between a mute French woman and an American tour guide. The relationship between the two is ending right before 9/11, with a typical break-up dialogue, this time in sign language. Most of the segment is semi-mute, with only faint sounds to immerse the audience more into that silent relationship. It is as if Lelouche is putting the shaky political relationship between France and the USA on the screen, where the two countries have a lot in common, but one side feels more superior, while the other lacks the power to fully express herself.

6. Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso): Yet another human tragedy, this time in Africa: poverty and a plethora of diseases overshadowing everything happening in the outside world. A bunch of school kids who thought they saw Osama Bin-Laden hanging around in their little town. They only care about the 25 million dollars reward for catching Bin-Laden, and they innocently imagine how that sum of money would help cure thousands of people in their country of their diseases. Ouedraogo again tries to point out that the world is full of problems, and the billions spent on the war on terrorism could probably solve a lot of those problems if spent the right way.

7. Mira Nair (India): The first thing I noticed about this segment is that the Indian director chose a true story of a Pakistani family living in New York to base her film on. Salman, a Pakistani-American young man, disappears on September the 11th, and because he is a Muslim, the FBI starts to investigate the possibility of him being a terrorist. Six months later the remains of Salman are identified at ground zero, and it turns out that he rushed to the World Trade Center towers as soon as he heard of the attacks to participate in the rescue efforts, but he ended up losing his life right there. It's a straight-forward story about the legalized racial profiling which became the norm in the US after 9/11.

8. Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran): A village of Afghan refugees in Iran right after 9/11. The only landmark of the village is the chimney of a brick factory. The refugees in that village heard that the US decided to attack Afghanistan, so they start making bricks to build a shelter. The young kids working in the brick factory are then gathered by their teacher who told them about the attacks on New York. The kids innocently started to argue whether it was God who caused the destruction of the two towers. They keep arguing, even during the minute of silence they were supposed to observe for the victims. Makhmalbaf actually calls her segment "God, Construction and Destruction", and she was able to put that theme in a set of simple and innocent dialogues between the kids.

9. Youssef Chahine (Egypt): Chahine's segment was so confused, which probably reflects his, and many Arabs', personal mood after 9/11. He put the questions he has been asking himself in the form of a dialogue between him and an imaginary US Marine who was killed in Beirut almost 20 years earlier. The loss of innocent life hurts him, but at the same time he holds the US government responsible for a lot of crimes worldwide. He acknowledges the fact that American civilians are innocent, but he also highlights their collective responsibility for their governments' actions because of their democratic right to choose their governments. This segment can be viewed as yet another part of Chahine's 4-part cinematic autobiography, probably the most confused, and confusing.

10. Amos Gitai (Israel): This is a hysterical segment taking place at the site of a suicide bombing in Jaffa, currently a part of Tel-Aviv. Again, because of the condensed nature of those films Gitai used the hysterical movement of his cast, ambulances and the camera to immerse the audience into the suicide bombing scene they have before them on the screen. At the very end, the live TV reporting of the bombing is interrupted because of the 9/11 news coming from New York. It is as if Gitai is saying that 9/11 will overshadow Israel's war on terrorism. If that was really what he meant, time has already proven that he was wrong.

11. Alejandro González Iñárritu (Mexico): This is the mirror image of Lelouch's segment: sound with almost no picture at all. It's a black screen most of the time, with sudden short glimpses of people jumping from the towers. Throughout the segment we hear people screaming and news broadcasts in different languages. At the very end, we see the towers collapsing and then the segment ends with "Does God's light guide us or blind us?" written on a bright white background in Arabic and then translated into English. It seems like Iñárritu wanted to dedicate his black segment to the Arab world, but the bad news is that this kind of films doesn't sell there. When we want to watch something black, we just watch the news.