20 years on, can cin­e­ma teach us any­thing new about ⁹⁄₁₁?

Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, 8:46am: a hijacked pas­sen­ger flight col­lides with the North Tow­er of the World Trade Cen­ter in New York. 9:03am: a sec­ond plane hits the South Tow­er. 9:59am: the South Tow­er col­laps­es. 10:28am: the North Tow­er collapses.

For any­one who lived through the ⁹⁄₁₁ attacks, this time­line will be imprint­ed in their mind. And for any­one watch­ing from out­side of the imme­di­ate vicin­i­ty, the events and images of that day will have been fil­tered through the lens of TV news. ⁹⁄₁₁ was a tru­ly tele­vi­su­al event; this was, of course, the ter­ror­ists’ inten­tion, a suc­cess­ful method of spread­ing ter­ror and para­noia across the world.

Attempts to drama­tise ⁹⁄₁₁ began almost imme­di­ate­ly. By Sep­tem­ber 2002, 11 direc­tors from across the world, includ­ing Ale­jan­dro González Iñár­ritu, Mira Nair and Ken Loach, had cre­at­ed shorts for the wild­ly vary­ing anthol­o­gy film 11’09”01 Sep­tem­ber 11. Five years after the attacks, Oliv­er Stone direct­ed World Trade Cen­ter, focus­ing on police offi­cers trapped in the col­lapsed tow­ers’ rub­ble, while Paul Green­grass made Unit­ed 93, about the tit­u­lar hijacked flight and the fight­back by air­line crew and passengers.

Like these dra­mas, many doc­u­men­taries have homed in on small details in the day’s nar­ra­tive, from the sto­ries and sur­vivors’ guilt of pas­sen­gers who missed their hijacked flights, to vol­un­teer fire­fight­ers who answered the call for help at Ground Zero. Oth­ers – most famous­ly Michael Moore’s Fahren­heit ⁹⁄₁₁, still the high­est-gross­ing doc­u­men­tary of all time – have focused on the polit­i­cal fall­out, includ­ing the War on Ter­ror declared by Pres­i­dent George W Bush and the sup­pos­ed­ly anti-ter­ror­ist Patri­ot Act passed by the US Con­gress in Octo­ber 2001.

With the events of ⁹⁄₁₁ so fre­quent­ly replaced in both fic­tion and doc­u­men­tary cin­e­ma, can any­thing new be revealed 20 years on? Three doc­u­men­taries shown at Sheffield Doc/​Fest, each due to air on TV lat­er this year, pro­vide three very dif­fer­ent answers.

⁹⁄₁₁: One Day in Amer­i­ca is a six-part series made for Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the ⁹⁄₁₁ Memo­r­i­al & Muse­um. Its open­ing fea­ture-length episode doc­u­ments – with astound­ing footage, some nev­er-before-seen – the morn­ing of ⁹⁄₁₁, from the fore­bod­ing, eerie calm-before-the-storm feel­ing of an ​‘ordi­nary’ Tues­day, through to both planes hit­ting the Twin Tow­ers, right up to just before the col­lapse of the first tow­er. It is doc­u­men­tary as doc­u­ment, an attempt to recount defin­i­tive­ly, in painstak­ing detail and for pos­ter­i­ty, one of the most sig­nif­i­cant days in US history.

Part of the suc­cess of One Day in Amer­i­ca lies in its exploita­tion of the audience’s pre­ex­ist­ing knowl­edge. When we see peo­ple idly film­ing the fire in the first tow­er, we know that a sec­ond strike is immi­nent. When we see peo­ple slow­ly walk­ing away from the scene, vis­i­bly shell­shocked, we know that they will soon be enveloped in dust and may not sur­vive. The episode even ends on a cliffhang­er of sorts: a huge rum­ble is heard and fire­fight­ers and cam­era oper­a­tors run for cov­er. They have no idea what is hap­pen­ing, but we do.

Wit­ness­ing and remem­brance are equal­ly key to Sur­viv­ing ⁹⁄₁₁ (a work­ing title), pro­duced for the BBC. Where­as One Day in Amer­i­ca pri­mar­i­ly func­tions as a his­tor­i­cal record, Sur­viv­ing ⁹⁄₁₁ explores the two decades since ⁹⁄₁₁, and how indi­vid­ual wounds have healed – or, indeed, fes­tered. A griev­ing broth­er has fall­en down the rab­bit hole of ⁹⁄₁₁ con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, con­vinced that the offi­cial nar­ra­tive isn’t the whole truth. A woman who suf­fered severe burns dur­ing the attacks speaks about her recov­ery, while her son deals with bouts of extreme anger and PTSD. A British woman who was an artist-in-res­i­dence at the Twin Tow­ers found liv­ing in New York too trau­mat­ic and so returned to the UK, where she has been metic­u­lous­ly (and ther­a­peu­ti­cal­ly) recre­at­ing a paint­ing of the view from her win­dow on the 91^st floor of the North Tower.

⁹⁄₁₁ wasn’t just a day for these peo­ple, it was a rup­ture in their lives, and the inter­ven­ing years are as impor­tant to their sto­ry as the ini­tial 24 hours after the attacks. In the Shad­ow of ⁹⁄₁₁ sits on the fringes of this doc­u­men­tary sub­genre, giv­en that the attacks are only oblique­ly referred to on a cou­ple of occa­sions. (A cyn­i­cal observ­er may ques­tion whether its title is an attempt to cash-in on ⁹⁄₁₁, giv­en the wide scope of events that could be said to fall under its shad­ow.) That being said, it holds com­mon ground with Sur­viv­ing ⁹⁄₁₁ in telling a sto­ry influ­enced by changes in post‑9/​11 US soci­ety and politics.

In 2006, an FBI sting oper­a­tion result­ed in the arrest of sev­en men sub­se­quent­ly known as the ​‘Lib­er­ty City Sev­en’, who were pur­port­ed­ly plan­ning a ​“full ground war” against the US. The group’s leader, Narseal ​‘Naz’ Batiste, told an FBI infor­mant that he had plans to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tow­er, killing more than a mil­lion peo­ple in an event that would be ​“even greater than 9÷11”. It was clear to the FBI, how­ev­er, that the group had no weapons, no mon­ey and no abil­i­ty to car­ry out such an attack. This sto­ry, which formed the basis of Chris Mor­ris’ 2019 film The Day Shall Come, is imbued with the post‑9/​11 para­noia of gov­ern­ment agen­cies who were too scared to ignore even the most unlike­ly ter­ror­ist threat, again demon­strat­ing that 9/11’s fall­out had a vast spread both geo­graph­i­cal­ly and temporally.

The imme­di­ate TV cov­er­age of ⁹⁄₁₁ was essen­tial­ly a doc­u­men­tary in itself. With the events so wide­ly-viewed, a cru­cial task for con­tem­po­rary doc­u­men­tar­i­ans is to find a new angle, either through untold sto­ries or by look­ing at the facts in a dif­fer­ent way. Whether new doc­u­men­taries about ⁹⁄₁₁ are strict­ly nec­es­sary depends on your stance on doc­u­men­taries in gen­er­al. As an exer­cise in preser­va­tion and rec­ol­lec­tion, it appears very lit­tle new infor­ma­tion is out there to be dis­cov­ered. But for those who see doc­u­men­tary first and fore­most as a sto­ry­telling medi­um, the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. As long as peo­ple vow to nev­er for­get ⁹⁄₁₁ and its after­math, there will always be new sto­ries to tell.