Terror revisited
One of the darkest days in US history and its aftermath are examined in a series of documentaries and dramas.
The 20th anniversary of 9/11 is being marked by many hours of programmes dedicated to the first great defining event of the 21st century and its aftermath. Some of the major streaming services are delivering new one-off documentaries and in some cases extensive series about the September 11 attacks, which left nearly 3000 dead and sparked wars that killed hundreds of thousands more.
The pick of the bunch is the biggest: 9/11: ONE DAY IN AMER
ICA is a new six-part series that screens nightly on Sky’s National Geographic channel (September 6-11, 7.30pm) before it becomes available on streaming service Disney+ on September 11.
The main focus of the programme is on first-hand accounts of those who survived the destruction of the World Trade Center and those who rescued them. It’s been made in conjunction with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and is executive-produced by the Oscar-winning partnership of Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin, whose acclaimed past films include Undefeated, LA 92 and the recent Tina Turner documentary Tina.
The film-makers recorded the memories of 54 people, with the resulting 235 hours of interviews and 951 hours of archive and unseen footage edited into the six episodes. The first-person accounts include those of Joseph Pfeifer, the first fire chief to arrive – with a French film crew making a doco about a rookie firefighter in tow – having seen the first hijacked airliner hit the North Tower while at another call-out. His brother, Kevin, was among the 343 firefighters who died in the buildings’ collapse.
Says Martin, “Our hope with this series was to bring to the forefront the true human experience of 9/11 in a way that would honour both the victims and the survivors of the attacks that day – a series that forgoes the geopolitical implications and instead focuses on the experience of the people who were there.”
The geopolitical implications are to the fore in Netflix’s
TURNING POINT: 9/11 AND THE WAR ON TERROR (from September 1). The five-part docuseries, by veteran US director Brian Knappenberger, doesn’t spend much time at Ground Zero, but takes the broad view, looking at how the US political decisions post9/11 resulted in a protracted 20-year war in Afghanistan, which has now returned to Taliban control. Interviewees include past White House officials, former CIA staffers, US military veterans, Afghanistan army soldiers and civilians and Taliban commanders.
A BBC-Apple joint production, INSIDE THE PRESIDENT’S WAR ROOM (Apple TV+, date to be confirmed) is a feature-length documentary promising a minute-by-minute account of the George W Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks in the 12 hours that followed. Among the interviewees are Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and many more. It’s narrated by Jeff Daniels, who starred in the best 9/11-based drama of recent times, The Looming Tower (Amazon Prime). Daniels played real-life FBI counterterrorism agent John O’Neill as the bureau battled with the CIA over information about the threat of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Quitting the FBI and becoming head of security at the World Trade Center, O’Neill died in the 9/11 attacks.
The CIA gets a gung-ho docudrama account of its post-9/11 manhunt for the mastermind in FIRST IN: CIA VS BIN LADEN (History Channel, Tuesday, 8.30pm).
Among the free-to-air networks, TVNZ Duke is offering three older one-hour 9/11 documentaries on consecutive nights. The first is 2009’s 9/11: PHONE CALLS FROM THE
TOWERS (Tuesday, 8.30pm). That’s followed by THE LAST SECRETS OF 9/11 (Wednesday, 8.30pm), about the efforts to recover and identify human remains from the rubble, and 9/11: CONTROL THE SKIES
(Thursday, 8.30pm), about how US air-traffic controllers handled the emergency. l