Film highlights worldwide Sept. 11 reactions

About an hour and ten minutes into 11'09"01 -- September 11, a cell phone rings. Instead of impatiently shushing and glaring, the audience remained respectfully silent during this breach of movie theatre etiquette. The audience listened as a woman dialed home and left a message on her answering machine.

What made this call home different from most was that it was projected through the theater's speakers. The audience was listening to an unidentified woman aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center call home to tell her family that she loved them.

This semi-voyeuristic moment of eavesdropping occurred during the climax of Mexican director Alejandro Gonz lez I¬ rritu's segment of 11'09"01 - September 11. The film, presented to Tufts by EPIIC's Film Series, is made up of 11 short films from 11 directors of 11 different nationalities. Producer Alain Brigand gave the directors only one restriction: each film was required to be 11 minutes, 9 seconds, and one frame long -- mirroring the European way of writing the date of Sept. 11.

EPIIC showed the film because it ties in to this year's Film Series topic: "Dilemmas of Empire and Nation Building: The United States' Role in the World."

Heather Barry, the Associate Director of the Institute for Global Leadership, said that with directors from all around the world, filmgoers were able to "get a whole range of perspectives from outside of the U.S."

Barry believes this film is effective in showing "how different people react to the same event." It confronts the viewer with other people's realities, "whether you agree or not," Barry said.

Barry highlighted the fact that the views of each director "don't represent their entire country." Two of the film shorts, by British director Ken Loach and Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, have been criticized for presenting controversial views of the U.S. and its attitude toward the events of Sept. 11.

Loach's short is told in a voiceover from the point of view of a Chilean exile who compares the events of Sept. 11, 2001 to those of Sept. 11, 1973, when Chilean president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a violent U.S.-backed coup that resulted in the assassinations of thousands. The piece is critical of the U.S.'s part in the coup and looks for some sympathy for its own Sept. 11 disaster.

Chahine's segment tells the story of a filmmaker who was trying to get shots of the World Trade Center the morning of Sept. 11. Returning to Egypt, he is troubled by what he witnessed that day, and he sees the vision of an American soldier who was killed in Beirut.

At one point, the soldier expresses his frustration at the anti-American sentiments he sees outside of the U.S. The filmmaker responds by saying that since the U.S. is a democracy, everyone is responsible for the government and its sometimes-violent actions in other nations.

I¬ rritu's piece elicited some of the strongest reactions. It opened with an entirely black screen and the sounds of news reporters joyously announcing that Sept. 11 would be a beautiful Tuesday morning. The blackness was intermittently interrupted with shots of people jumping from the crumbling World Trade Center towers. Gradually, the news reports became more and more frantic, and eventually included messages from people trapped in the towers or on the planes. In the end, the screen faded to white and a question came up on screen in Arabic and English which said "Does God's light guide us or blind us?"

Not all of the films were so emotionally wrenching -- the piece from Idrissa Ouedraogo of Burkina Faso was humorously heartwarming, showing young boys plotting to capture a man they thought was Osama bin Laden so that they could collect the ransom and help one of the boys' sick mother.

EPIIC will be showing the film again this coming Thursday, Feb. 12. EPIIC will also address some of the issues the film raised in its panel about the War on Terror during its spring Symposium.