After the 9/11 attacks, it at first seemed as if the film industry would respond in a major way, telling many stories related to that day.
In fact, exactly one year later, in the fall of 2002, a collaborative effort from 11 international filmmakers quietly arrived in arthouse cinemas in a few American cities.
The movie was called, simply, “11. 09. 01 — September 11” and was a mix of short films, all of which addressed either directly or obliquely the events of that day. Some were bluntly painful, such as “Babel” director Alejandro González Iñarritu’s news footage depicting falling bodies from the Twin Towers. Others, such as Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf’s brief visit with elementary-school-aged children discussing the nature of divine punishment (“God hasn’t got airplanes,” says one little girl. “God builds humans.”) were quietly and sadly wise.
Story: In 9/11 movies, it's little moments that touch us
But after that small offering, it felt like Hollywood might be taking a hands-off policy. Two 2006 projects attracted reasonably large audiences: “World Trade Center,” with its heartfelt, real-life story of two police officers trapped under the collapsed towers, and “United 93,” a harrowing real-time account of the events that may have taken place aboard the flight that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. “United 93” earned two Academy Award nominations for direction and editing. Two other wide releases, the Adam Sandler drama “Reign Over Me” and Robert Pattinson's “Remember Me,” failed to connect with audiences.
Independent filmmaker Brian Sloan can count himself among the handful of writer-directors to explicitly address the events of 9/11. His movie, the 2005 indie “WTC View,” about a New Yorker trying to rent out a room in his Twin Towers-adjacent apartment, is fictional but began with a true story. The New York-based director, who lives a short distance from what is now Ground Zero, placed an ad for a roommate on Sept. 10, 2001. His experiences talking to people who visited the apartment after the attacks, all of whom had stories to tell, eventually became a play and then a film. And the immediate nature of his experience felt like it needed to be told sooner rather than later.
“What inspired me,” said Sloan, “was realizing that I was living in a remarkable period in history and I felt compelled to document that. There was the big story, of course. But there was also this story of how people in the city were living with this immense thing that happened and how they dealt with keeping their lives together afterward.”
Another early entry, Spike Lee’s “25th Hour,” wasn't about the attacks, but featured memorable related images. The drama opens with the image of the twin floodlights that recreated the towers and later features Ground Zero excavation work. Aaron Hillis, curator of Brooklyn’s reRun Gastropub Theater and journalist for The Village Voice, wasn't at first sure the images worked. “The film's evocation seemed timely but unjustifiably shoehorned for an adaptation of a novel published months before the towers fell," Hillis said. "And yet, over the years, those melancholic images have haunted me more than any other piece of post-9/11 cinema.” Read more...
My Heart Remembers
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Hollywood struggles with 9/11 films
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