9/11 : ONE DAY IN AMERICA at AFI DOCS
By armen pandola
What makes a great documentary?
It's a movie that is more real than the most realistic fictional movie you have ever seen. It's a movie that is more human than anything anyone has ever made up. It's more than a movie - it's a bundle of reality, of places and times and people.
The new documentary, 9/11: One Day in America, is about that most infamous day in recent American history. If you are like most people, you don't want to relive that day. And to a certain extent, the media has acknowledged that reluctance by sanitizing most videos and photos of that terrible day.
But 9/11 is about more than the horrors, the deaths, the terror of that day - it's about the incredible resilience and heroism of ordinary people on an extraordinary day, in an extraordinary place and at an extraordinary time.
9/11 is a movie that reveals things about something you think you know everything about, but don't. For example, did you know that there was a Marriott Hotel between the two towers? No, well, you'll hear the story of a man who was at work in its kitchen that morning and how he entered the frozen storage box to get supplies and was, effectively, in isolation for the first fifteen minutes after the first plane struck the north tower. When he went into the box, there were dozens of people in the kitchen busily getting meals ready; when he came out, there was no one there.
9/11 will tell you the story of the Fire Battalion Chief who was in lower Manhattan that morning with his firemen trying to track down a suspected gas leak. A film crew happened to be with him that day, and so we see his reaction and the reaction of his men as a huge airliner makes a terrifying bang as it passes them and then explodes into the north tower. From the beginning, he knew it was not an accident, but an attack.
There are stories of ordinary people putting themselves into harm's way to help someone, often a stranger. There are videos of the panic that is palpable as the second tower is struck by another passenger jet. There is video of dozens of people diving out of windows 80 stories up rather than face the flames that engulfed the upper towers. And there is video of the terror that overtook everyone when at 9:59 a.m. the south tower collapsed. And here, reality imitates art as crowds of people are running toward the camera, being chased by a suffocating wall of concrete, glass, dust and debris that was the south tower and that is gaining on them as they run in terror.
9/11 allows its witnesses to speak directly to the viewer, often in their own homes. There is no need to embellish their stories with film techniques or gimmicks. What they have to tell us comes right from the heart. It's a story they will never forget that happened on a day none of us will ever forget.
9/11 has been examined and discussed and relived many, many times and no doubt will continue to be. T.S. Eliot said it best:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
9/11 will help you see that day for the first time, again.
Director: Daniel Bogado
Producer: Caroline Marsden
Executive Producers: David Glover, Dan Lindsay, T.J. Martin
Directors of Photography: Brandon Widener, Duane McClunie, Stefan Wiesen
Editor: Chris Nicholls
Music: David Schweitzer
Running Time (minutes): 163
FIRST THREE OF SIX EPISODES AVAILABLE NOW AT AFI DOCS.