The View From Abroad

COURTESEY THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART,NYC
Old Power: In Gilles Barbier's Nursing Home, 2002, America is an impotent hero

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MOVIES: An omnibus of short films on Sept. 11 from 11 directors skeptical of American power

As stridently right-wing as political talk radio is these days, that's how left-wing the foreign-film scene is. So when the French producer Alain Brigand looked for 11 international directors to make short films on the reverberations of the World Trade Center attack, he didn't find many in a moistly elegiac mood.

11'09"01: September 11 is full of criticism of U.S. policy, and will be shown in art houses attended by people who can cheer or stomach such criticism; it's the left talking to the left. Still, the abrasive quality has a tonic effect. The movie makes points worth hearing and since its segments include stellar work from world-class filmmakers worth seeing. The mix is instructively heady: a Molotov cocktail of storytelling, journalism, personal essay and agitprop about the country that other people love, envy, resent.

Brigand's only stipulation was that each film last 11 min. 9 sec. and one frame, to match the European notation for the date 9/11/01. The segments vary widely in quality, and it would have been O.K. if each had lasted only 9 min. 11 sec. But there are small pearls here.

Some directors find subtlety in far-flung reactions to the event. In an Afghan refugee camp in Iran (the piece by Samira Makhmalbaf), a teacher tries to explain the tragedy to kids who think the worst calamity is when the village well overflows. In Burkina Faso (the director is Idrissa Ouedraogo), some boys spot a man who looks like Osama bin Laden and try to capture him for the $25 million ransom. In Sean Penn's vignette, an old man (Ernest Borgnine) stricken by his wife's death lives in a lower Manhattan flat where the flowers are wilting from lack of sunlight. He gets up one morning and happily finds them in bloom, not realizing that it's because one of the Twin Towers no longer blocks the light.

The dominant mood, though, is finger pointing. Mira Nair's segment describes the agony of a Pakistani-American mother whose missing son was accused of terrorism when he had in fact rushed to ground zero in a rescue effort. Egypt's Youssef Chahine makes the bizarre argument that militants have the right to kill American and Israeli civilians because in democracies the people choose their leaders and thus are responsible for policies that enslave the world.

A few pieces set in Chile (Ken Loach), Israel (Amos Gitai), Bosnia (Danis Tanovic) make a single hectoring, helpful point: that many countries have suffered atrocities for years, decades, centuries, sometimes with U.S. connivance. Loach's strong segment is about Tuesday, Sept. 11, 1973, the date of the U.S.-backed overthrow of Chile's Allende government; 30,000, not 3,000, died in that coup and its aftermath.

Segments like Loach's are a slap in the face of American righteousness. The slap is meant not to knock us senseless but to awaken us to the suffering that is to say, the humanity we share with the rest of the world. In the view of these filmmakers, Sept. 11 admitted us to a club that everyone else belongs to.

--By Richard Corliss