Films and documentaries on the attacks that shook the world

“How much is life worth?” (“Worth” is its original title) is a film by Sara Colangelo which, while having a brief introduction in which she is conversant with air strikes, focuses on the (real) story of Kenneth Feinberg (Michael keaton), a leading lawyer and university professor specializing in mediating financial compensation cases in the event of a person’s death. The problem is that in the case of the Twin Towers, 2,996 people were killed and, had they had to face trials of millionaires individually, the Treasury in particular and the economy of the United States as a whole would literally have went bankrupt.

At the head of a team of lawyers _ Feinberg’s main collaborator is played by Amy Ryan_, the protagonist must conceive in a few months a formula to determine how much a life is worth and then have it accepted by the great majority. The premise may seem a bit dry, abstract and even cynical at first, especially under such circumstances, but the director of “Little Accidents” and “The Kindergarten Teacher” goes from the legal and the arithmetic to the intimate when the protagonist (an obsessive of cold numbers and inviolable paragraphs) he finds himself in the various interviews with the wives (or lovers) of the victims and begins to change his gaze.

There are “shark” lawyers who represent the families of millionaires and who, of course, claim compensation according to what the heads of multinational corporations have “been worth” in the case of a young man who, despite having been in a relationship for many years with another man When he dies he runs the risk of not receiving a single dollar because the victim’s conservative parents not only question this relationship, but even deny that she has exist. Without papers or laws to protect it, we know that the state cannot recognize or guarantee the rights of individuals or minorities.

The scenes between Feinberg (“Batman”, “Birdman”, “Featured”) by Michael Keaton and Charles Wolfe (Stanley Tucci), a lawyer who lost his wife in the attacks and becomes a reference for most relatives of the victim, are anthology. It is that in their visions many times opposed to the problems and the relations, the tensions and the contradictions of a film are exposed and synthesized which at the beginning can annoy a little, but which ends up moving without low blows, with austerity. and a nobility who appreciate each other. .

Netflix was also released this week “Turning point: 9/11 and the fight against terrorism”, a documentary series in five parts of one hour each in which, here, every detail of the attacks is reconstructed with imposing precision (there is a lot of archival material unpublished, testimonies of survivors, audio recordings of planes, control towers and security agencies).

But it’s not just that (which is quite a bit): acclaimed director and producer Brian Knappenberger also offers a timeline that dates back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to understand the background and context. in which they occurred. as well as the no less bloody consequences: the war against terrorism, more precisely against Al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

With an at times quite questioning look at the politics of the president of the time of George W. Bush, a complex puzzle appears on the screen with the changing boards of the various decades, which include various ethnic groups, tribes and factions, Islamists moderates and extremist jihadists, multiple leaders, politicians and soldiers involved in a quarrel not only warlike but also economic and religious.

Both in “How Much Is Life Worth?” as in “Tourning point: 9/11 and the fight against terrorism”, reference is made to the case of the aforementioned United flight 93 which did not reach its destination thanks to the riot of the passengers and, in this sense, it is good to remember that there are two films about these events of civil heroism that were released almost simultaneously in 2006: “Flight 93” (“United 93”), by Paul Greengrass (available on HBO Max, Netflix and Movistar Play), and “Flight 93”, by Peter Markle.

In any case, these are not the only films related to the events of 2001 to recover nowadays: on Netflix and Movistar Play, you can also see “Las Torres Gemelas” (“World Trade Center”), which Oliver Stone filmed in 2006 with Nicolas Cage and Maria Bello; “Hope Lives in Me” (“Reign Over Me”, 2007), with Adam Sandler as a dentist turned into a banshee after losing his family on one of the 9/11 flights (Movistar Play); and “The Darkest Night” (“Zero Dark Thirty”, 2012), by the talented Kathryn Bigelow, who has been re-enacting the hunt for Osama Bin Laden for over a decade (it’s on Netflix and Movistar Play). And there are many more that also touch (sometimes tangentially) life stories related to this turning point in US history.

For its part, Excerpt from the documentary “In the shadow of the Towers: September 11 in Stuyvesant” (HBO) is worth mentioning., based on interviews with eight New Yorkers (teenagers at the time) studying at Stuyvesant Public High School, located four blocks from the World Trade Center; “What Happened on September 11” (2019), a very educational film for the whole family directed by Amy Schatz (Movistar Play); and “Fahrenheit 9/11”, the explosive essay by Michael Moore (available on YouTube) which harshly and crudely implicated the actions of his government and which won him nothing less than the Palme d’Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.