A collection of shorts by 11 filmmakers that debuted on the festival circuit last year, 11'09"01 has already attracted hostility for daring to offer different responses to the events of Sept. 11, 2001 than, say, the desire to bomb the fuck out of some Middle Eastern backwater. Here, there is shock, grief, sympathy, confusion and revulsion and 11'09"01 is valuable for the way it captures a wide range of reactions, especially in light of how the Bush administration cynically directed the American public's most virulent feelings about 9/11 toward a country whose connections to Al-Qaeda may be as real as the Easter Bunny.

More controversially, 11'09"01 also conveys a certain smugness -- several filmmakers can't resist the temptation to suggest that America was getting a taste of the pain that it routinely, if clandestinely, dealt out to the rest of the globe. In his contribution, Ken Loach points out that Americans can't even claim the date as unique, Sept. 11 being the anniversary of the US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende's government in Chile. Clearly, the events of 9/11 are a volatile subject, one made even more so by the fact that the sole American contributor to 11'09"01 is Sean Penn, a man whose political beliefs -- judging by his bizarre trip to pre-war Baghdad -- may be most kindly described as idiosyncratic. (His short is also the most risible thing here.)

As with any omnibus film, the contents of 11'09"01 are variable in quality, but the highs are very high. In Samira Makhmalbaf's poignant vignette, Afghan schoolchildren struggle to understand even what a tower is (the frustrated teacher likens the World Trade Center to a nearby chimney stack). Mira Nair's true-life story about the family of a young Pakistani-American who is investigated as a possible terrorist before being celebrated as a hero is also deeply affecting. The most harrowing piece is by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who juxtaposes a dense soundtrack of music and news reports with a dark screen and pictures of people falling from the towers. The use of the latter is nearly indefensible, yet it restores power to an image that has been so often repeated and repackaged, we have become numb to its horror. 11'09"01 reminds us that however the events of that day will be seen or interpreted, the most important act is to remember them. As William Faulkner wrote, "The past isn't dead -- it isn't even past."

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