Eleven international filmmakers were asked by French producer Alain Brigand to come up with a short film relating to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001.
The only artistic restriction was that each individual film must last precisely 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame.
The resulting collaboration offers some diverse geographical, cultural, and artistic perspectives on those tragic events. But it benefits from prior knowledge, on the part of the viewer, towards the previous work of the various contributors.
Samira Makhmalbaf presents a female teacher, at an Afghani refugee camp in Iran, organising the children for a minute's silence. Meanwhile the adults express fears of an American bombardment.
Danis Tanovic shows the women of Srebrenica (a town where Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred in their thousands by Serbs on July 11 1995) continuing their monthly protests, despite the loss of life in America.
Idrissa Ouedraogo shows a young boy in Burkina Faso on the trail of an Osama Bin Laden lookalike, hoping for the reward of $25 million.
In the episodes by Sean Penn and Claude Lelouch, individuals are so preoccupied with their own personal problems that they remain oblivious to the television footage of the collapsing towers.
One of the connecting threads, throughout this portmanteau, is how television enabled the whole world to experience the horrors of that fateful morning.
Shohei Imamura makes the most baffling of the various contributions, with a story set in 1945 Japan where a man believes he's a snake. The veteran director concludes with the statement: "There is no such thing as a holy war."
Alejandro González Iñárritu's effort is the most abstract. It incorporates flashes of images of bodies falling from the World Trade Centre, accompanied by religious chanting.
Best of all is Ken Loach's segment, in which a Chilean refugee offers his condolences to the American victims. He then, in an open letter, remembers an earlier September 11 when a CIA-sponsored coup d'état installed the dictatorship of General Pinochet. It's a moving, persuasive reminder of a calamity the West would callously prefer to ignore.
11'09"01 - September 11 (2002)
