9/11 prompts faux documentary

“When September 11 happened, a lot of us lost something,” director Christian Johnston says. “We wanted to get in there and do something.”

Less than a year later, Johnston and a small cast and crew were on location in Afghanistan, making September Tapes, a film about another American, grief-stricken ex-soldier Don Larson (George Calil), whose response to the attacks is to get in and document “the truth behind September 11” with a digital camera.

Along the same lines, Johnston says he hopes the film will raise questions that many Americans have not asked about the way in which the search for Osama bin Laden was conducted. For example, why did many Afghans give little credit to President George W. Bush’s offer of a $25 million reward? Did, as many Afghans believed, the United States allow the conflict to extend in order to secure plans for an oil pipeline?

Most importantly, Johnston asks why the majority of Westerners, including U.N. officials and CNN analysts, were not aware of the list of al Qaeda’s specific demands. This list was made public several years before the Sept. 11 attacks, without response from any Western power. Though never directly sympathetic to the terrorists, the filmmakers constantly offer a perspective that includes the political context that led to the attacks.

The film is presented as a compendium of eight of Larson’s tapes found by soldiers on the Pakistani border shortly after a battle with al Qaeda. The videos contain footage of Larson, his Afghan-American interpreter Wali Zarif (Wali Razaqi), and their cameraman Sonny (Sunil Sadarangani) on their way from Kabul to the Pakistani border in the search for bin Laden.

Shot chronologically on location during the period the narrative covers, the piece treads a unique and sometimes treacherous line between reality and fiction. The main characters are invented, but most of the Afghans who appear are not actors, and many were unaware that the project was not a documentary.

From the start, everyone understood that filming in Afghanistan would be a risky undertaking. Only a few months earlier, the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan had shaken the world of journalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the filming commenced amid chaos: the day before their team landed in Afghanistan vice-president Haji Qadir was assassinated, and the crew’s first twenty-four hours in Kabul were punctuated by multiple bomb threats.

“I think all of us had some reservations,” Johnston says when asked about the danger. “We had no official U.N., no U.S. support. We were told if anything happened not to call them.” He hopes that the film reflects the fear and anxiety he felt as a Westerner in Afghanistan. “It was a humbling experience,” he says, “realizing that there was a bounty on our heads, that we were unprotected.”

From the beginning, however, the crew believed deeply in the film’s importance. In the planning stages, when it became clear just how unwilling studios were to offer funding, each personally invested several thousands of dollars in order to make it happen. “Not a small amount of money,” Johnston says. “It was a big commitment to the project.”

Even when the situation was at its scariest, the crew maintained the determination to record the chaos of post-war Afghanistan. Johnston says that his film gave some Afghans their first chance to voice their opinions of the situation. In spite of the risks involved in associating with Western journalists, the locals the crew met were eager to have a part in the project, and he believes they spoke honestly in the casual interviews captured on tape.

Despite Johnston’s ostensibly noble sense of purpose, a number of critics call September Tapes a craven attempt to cash in on the Sept. 11 tragedy, and several have suggested that the film should not have been made at all.

Amid complaints about Blair Witch-style camerawork and flat, reality-show type dialogue, their principal criticism is of the highly ambiguous blend of reality and fiction, which leaves them wondering whether they should trust anything the film says. Only the credits (which list the names of actors who played each role) indicate that it is a work of fiction.

Johnston, however, doesn’t consider the blend problematic. He wanted the film to be accessible and appealing to Americans who are not normally attracted to documentaries. This includes his father, a Vietnam veteran who “just doesn’t go see documentaries.” Furthermore, he claims, “all documentaries are manipulated to some degree…the truth was not just floating there for us to find.”

The DVD version of the film will feature footage of the real crew’s journey during production, which may help audiences distinguish which elements were scripted and which were real and help deflate criticism on that count.

Also under heavy fire is the “unsympathetic” and “unbelievable” character of Don Larson, whose ill-advised actions frequently put his companions in danger. One reviewer complains that Lars acts “like a combination of John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone,” and declares that September Tapes is not a “serious film.”

Johnston, seemingly aware of the criticism, claims that Larson’s personality was deliberately created to provoke. Johnston and Van Gregg were influenced by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and the pseudo-documentary recreation of the French war in Algeria, The Battle of Algiers, and they do not consider their protagonist a hero, even though some of his opinions and emotions coincide with theirs. Rather, Larson’s preoccupation with the attacks on the U.S., his superficial knowledge of Afghanistan and his frequently cavalier attitude towards collateral damage are intended to reflect critically on American foreign policy all over the globe.

When asked whether he feared that the public reaction to the film might stall over questions about the film’s “real” and staged episodes, Johnston said that it “might, to a certain degree.” But even if viewers are skeptical, he says he will have achieved one of his goals.

“Even if we don’t answer our question, at least we pose it,” he says. “I want people who see this to leave and question everything they see.” Still, given the frustration and indignation that the film has sparked among critics, there looms the unfortunate possibility that this experiment’s main themes are too understated to effectively convey Johnston’s point.