THE STORY – With a quarter century’s perspective, the documentary IX XI takes a new look at 9/11. The film tells a dozen personal stories through deeply intimate conversations with New Yorkers from multiple facets of the city. Each vividly recounts their own story at the instant of being pulled together by a world historical event. These interviews are complimented by previously unseen archival material, and film footage that evokes interviewees’ internal states, and makes reference to the image bank we all draw from as a cinematic culture.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Sean Wilsey (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 86 minutes
There is no shortage of 9/11 documentaries. Twenty-five years on, the event has been examined, archived, and memorialized so thoroughly that any new documentary on the subject almost feels burdened by the need to justify its own existence. Director Sean Wilsey is aware that he must make “IX XI” his own while still honoring the event, the people, and the city. It tries, earnestly and with some creativity, to do things differently…and it partially succeeds.
The film’s premise, as is made clear in its intro, is simple: it’s not about people killed in the tragedy or loved ones lost. It’s just a group of 12 people recounting their personal experiences of September 11th. They are not first responders or grieving relatives. Just regular people who were going about their regular business that day but were deeply, irrevocably affected – as we all were. A professional skateboarder. A cartoonist. A UPS driver. A Tibetan restauranteur. A news cameraman. By grounding the documentary in the mundane rather than the monumental, Wilsey makes a quiet argument that the scale and effect of 9/11 are best understood not through its most dramatic stories, but through its most ordinary ones.
The film opens with archival footage of architect Minoru Yamasaki speaking about how world trade could mean world peace, and that his Twin Towers were a physical representation of that idea. It’s a devastating way to begin, given what follows: footage of smoke billowing from the towers, debris falling. There was no peace in the world that day, despite what Yamasaki had intended when he designed the World Trade Center.
Wilsey’s most distinctive choice is his staging of the interviews. To keep this from feeling like one talking-head interview after another (which it is), he stages his subjects in different ways to add variety. His subjects sit in a dark, mirrored room or, most prominently, behind a table with a reflective water surface, with ripples becoming a frequent visual motif. There are two images of the subject in the former: one is their true physical self, and the other is a reflection of it. The idea is clearly evocative, playing on the fact that the documentary is all about people reflecting. It is also a nod to the memorial pools that exist today, where the towers once stood. The grey steel backgrounds, lit in blue and red, call back to the towers’ material and symbolism. Taken together, these elements can be thoughtful yet also distracting. Wilsey uses the table with the reflective water surface to split the screen horizontally and have it drift upwards like a VHS tracking line. The creativity is commendable, of course, but it can be distracting from what the subject is recounting.
“IX XI” also frequently cuts to movie footage to bring visuals to the interviews. A couple of subjects describe how they felt when they first arrived in New York. How it was scary, dirty, thrilling, and rebellious; this commentary is placed alongside scenes from Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” (ironically, Griffin Dunne is one of the film’s subjects) and John Cassavetes’ “Gloria”. The cuts to various movie scenes are jarring, more often than not. This contrasts with cartoonist Roz Chast, whose interview features her own drawings as a visual accompaniment to her story. It works perfectly, but it exposes the inconsistency of the approach elsewhere, where “The Sound of Music,” for example, is added to provide additional dialogue. While it does have a comedic beat, the best visual language for each subject is their own emotion.
There are many striking stories throughout. A realtor showing an apartment with the perfect view of the World Trade Center just as the first plane hit. A man, convinced he was going to die that day, recounts walking into a restaurant mid-chaos and ordering six dishes off the menu along with champagne. (Unfortunately for him, he survived and had to pay the bill.) A young Muslim woman from California recounts the suspicion and islamophobia that was directed toward her at school in the aftermath. Her story widens the film’s scope beyond New York and reminds you that the ripples of that day reached everywhere.
But one of the more remarkable stories belongs to ABC News cameraman Stefan Springman, one of the film’s most energetic and candid subjects. That morning, he had been preparing to shoot a story about how to tell whether your pearls are real. A slow news day, right up until it wasn’t. He was among those who filmed the second plane striking the South Tower, and he speaks with disarming honesty about the terror and the simultaneous journalistic thrill of capturing a historic moment. That tension between human horror and professional instinct is an honest contrast that the film surfaces.
What “IX XI” does best is convey the texture of an ordinary morning. These were people going to work, running errands, moving through the city on a regular Tuesday. The film deliberately accumulates those conversations of normalcy, so when the event arrives, you feel the impact. With each subject’s own connection to the World Trade Center and archival footage of the towers themselves, you also get a sense of what was there and the weight of what is gone. The film carries a genuine sense of what the World Trade Center means to the city’s fabric – the way a building can represent so much and leave a hole that never fills, especially one that had been here throughout an entire life and was taken so violently.
You can’t say that “IX XI” is the best documentary about 9/11, but it does attempt to capture that day differently, without uncovering anything revelatory about the event. But it doesn’t really need to – it’s about the human experience of it all. Its value lies in the variety of its twelve perspectives, and in its insistence that the most expansive tragedies are understood by everyone. It’s one of those events where everyone remembers exactly what they were doing in that moment, and the film is at its best when it honors that deeply shared connection that held the world together when it felt like it was falling apart.
