Mixed reaction to tragedy

It seemed a good idea at the time, probably. Give 11 important film-makers $60,000 each to make a short film commemorating the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center; each episode to be precisely 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame of film. The result, unlike the outrage perpetrated, is unfortunately hit-and- miss.

Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran) honourably discharges her task with a teacher hopelessly trying to explain the impossible scale of it to a roomful of primary children who have only a brick kiln chimney for comparison.

Claude Lelouch (France) mounts a clever "end of the affair" anecdote about lovers (one of them deaf) reunited by the catastrophe. Youssef Chahine (Egypt) empathises in confusing fashion with the ghosts of a Palestinian suicide bomber and a US Marine. Danis Tanovic (Bosnia) commemorates the Srebrenica massacre in the monthly march of women on 11 September.

Idrissa Quedrago (Burkina Faso) brings welcome relief with a humorous squib about street kids stalking an Osama bin Laden figure for the huge dollar bounty. Alejandro-Gonz·lez I"Âarritu (Mexico) uses flash cuts of people jumping from the twin towers ambiguously captioned in Arabic, "Does God's light guide us or blind us?".

Amos Gitai (Israel) sets the global tragedy against the local indignation of a Tel Aviv TV journalist taken off the air when the news breaks. Mira Nair (India) reports how false rumour led to a Pakistani casualty being a suspected terrorist when he had actually been an on-site volunteer medic.

Sean Penn (US) relates a sob story about a lonely widower (Ernest Borgnine) whose dead flowers bloom again as the collapse of the skyscrapers lets the sunshine flood his room. And Shohei Imamura (Japan) tells a totally unfathomable fable about a Second World War soldier who thinks he's a snake.

In this mixed bag of the poetic, whimsical, sentimental and obscure, Nair's episode alone turns the dreadful event to public utility with its warning against instant anti-Muslim prejudice.

The 11th segment, Ken Loach's, is a confection that I hope few will feel expresses any substantial opinion in Britain. It is a vindictive anti-US, anti-Henry Kissinger diatribe. It is based, like Tanovic's, but without a shred of his compassion, on the coincidence of 11 September with another date in history: the US attack on President Allende's communist regime in Chile.

Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty are entitled to vent their bile through a parallel event that apparently causes them more distress than what Loach calls "a symbolic attack on the power represented by the World Trade Center and the Pentagon".

But the mass grave is the wrong site on which to set up their propaganda stall.

Such is the reductive power of the Marxist mentality that they can only see the deaths of nearly 3,000 people as "symbolic". The tastelessness is gross beyond words.
Released 27 December.