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Movie of civilization destroyed by US Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2002
French Sept. 11 Picture Has Anti-U.S. Elements
PARIS (Variety) - To commemorate the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, a French studio is unveiling an unusual omnibus movie called "11'09"01 September 11," which consists of 11 separate submissions from key directors in as many countries.
The problem: Several of the segments are stridently anti-American.
Consider the dialogue from the Egyptian submission directed by Youssef Chahine.
"The U.S. and Israel are democracies, their governments are elected by their people -- thus it is legitimate to attack their people," says the character, an unnamed filmmaker.
The segment goes on to talk about "the civilizations destroyed by the U.S.," and "the millions of victims" of American policy from Vietnam to Somalia.
The short also depicts with sympathy a Palestinian suicide bomber and his family.
Several of the other segments are fiercely critical of the United States -- a fact that could prove embarrassing, once the picture opens in French moviehouses Sept. 11 and in various international film festivals beginning with Toronto and Venice over the next few weeks. "11'09"01" has yet to find a U.S. distributor.
Embattled media giant Vivendi Universal's Studio Canal production unit commissioned 11 prominent film directors to each do an 11-minute short inspired by last year's attacks, and gave them "total freedom of expression." Studio Canal said Tuesday no executive was available to comment.
French press reports said the project was initated by producer Alain Brigand, who convinced recently ousted Vivendi chairman-CEO Jean-Marie Messier to back the movie.
The movie's first segment, from Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf, begins with Iranian schoolchildren explaining, "The United States want to bomb us, so we must built shelters."
Amid references to a possible U.S. atomic bombing of Iran, the teacher encourages the pupils to commemorate the 9/11 victims with a minute of silence, but the kids keep talking about their own local tragedies.
Even the British segment of the omnibus film takes the United States to task.
Directed by left-wing filmmaker Ken Loach, the segment focuses on another Sept. 11 tragedy, the 1973 coup d'etat against Chile's Marxist president Salvador Allende and the support provided to the subsequent military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet by U.S. president Richard Nixon.
Meanwhile, India's Mira Nair focuses on the true story of a Pakistani-American who died helping New York firefighters at the World Trade Center.
His unexplained disappearance on the date of the attack led to police and media suspicions of his possible association with terrorists -- something that wouldn't have happened if he had been named Jesus or David, his mother says in the segment.
Other contributions have little or no political spin -- or in a few cases, any apparent link with 9/11 aside from their moral tone.
These include contributions from France's Claude Lelouch, American Sean Penn, Burkina Faso's Idrissa Ouedraogo, Israel's Amos Gitai, Japan's Shohei Imamura, Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Bosnia's Danis Tanovic.
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