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Synopsis
Filmmakers David Belton and Bjørn Johnson unearth a treasure trove of hidden video testimony to create a unique, immersive story of 9/11 and its life-changing impact - both then and now. A revelation, midway through the film, delivers an emotionally uplifting portrait of the power of the human spirit. In the months following the attacks nearly six undred people - survivors and eyewitnesses - entered a simple plywood video booth. Inside this safe space, ordinary people used a self-operated camera to record their deepest feelings of trauma and loss.

In this startling and original film, dozens of personal testimonies from New York, Shanksville and the Pentagon, are woven together to create a raw, confessional intensity rarely seen in conventional documentary.
In a twist which broadens the narrative beyond its subject matter, some of the original contributors return twenty years later during the Covid pandemic, to a new video booth to reflect on living with their experience. Intertwining hope with grief, joy with loss, their testimonies deliver a poignant portrayal of the world after 9/11 and the world today; becoming a profound and timely meditation on the power of human resilience. The film was selected by the Toronto International Film Festival as its centrepiece documentary to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of 9/11.

FILMMAKER’S STATEMENTS

David Belton - Director's Statement
We make films at a time when, more than ever, the pressure is for stories to be heavily constructed, narratives built. Sometimes as I weave a film together, in the precision of the storytelling, I sense that something risks being lost. I’ve gone out and filmed, sat and asked people to share their stories and worked, in the cutting room to reflect what I have been told. But in all the craft and artfulness, the essence of who that person is and what they endured, can sometimes get diluted. For me, the films that work best hold onto that essence; they reveal truths that, without them, may have remained unmined.

I remember watching Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ many years ago, and finding that, as the film built, the testimonies grew into something that even those brave souls who spoke could not articulate.Here, watching the people talk from within Ruth’s unique booth felt similar and, given the unmediated nature of their words, I felt even more privileged. Whereas Lanzmann would set his camera down and ask holocaust survivors his own questions, Ruth’s camera simply rolled. I realised that we had to listen to their voices - to follow as well as to craft.

With that approach, we undertook to build the booth again and ask people to return and tell us about their lives since. What could we learn from them - especially at a time where we have felt such peril and loss. I think our film mirrors the world inside the booth and honours the precious bargain with the men, women and children who spoke. Their words resonate deeply with audiences: in sharing their stories, they are inviting us to do the same.

Bjørn Johnson - Director’s Statement
It’s not often in life, beyond the usual ceremonial milestones, that you can pinpoint a moment in time when you knew exactly how you felt. For me, the morning of September 11th 2001 - even before the first plane hit - was one such occasion. As I woke up that day I faced a life uncertain. I was consumed by grief following my mother’s recent and untimely passing, and then to compound it, I had lost my job only the day before. I felt like my world was ending and then within a few hours, it quite literally did. My reaction was palpable. I felt the shock and horror as we all did, but I also profoundly understood the grief and sudden loss of the victim’s families. I knew the reality of having someone snatched from you too soon and rightly or wrongly, I felt like I shared their pain. As a filmmaker, that feeling never left me and over the years I searched continuously for an approach to 9/11 that felt honest to my own experience.

Discovering Ruth Sergel’s project was the emotional truth I had long been looking for. From the moment I watched Michael Westcott’s testimony, I instinctively understood the power of what I was seeing. Here was a New York City police officer trying to rationalise what he had seen and struggling to process his grief. Sometimes he found the words, sometimes he didn’t. Either way, the camera captured it all. As someone who had sat in cutting rooms for most of his career, I knew that raw visceral footage of this nature did not come along very often and it needed to be nurtured. I immediately started to imagine what a film built around these testimonies might look like and perhaps naturally, I envisioned planes crashing and people falling. But then I began to edit and something extraordinary happened, the words of the people spoke for themselves and suddenly those horrific images seemed wholly inappropriate. From that moment, a much subtler vision formed in my mind. A vision that will strengthen the film’s integrity.

This will be a film in which words are just as powerful as pictures. Where archive is used to contextualise, not sensationalise. Where images are used to persuade, not manipulate. And where space is given, much like inside the booth itself, for people to share their deepest and innermost feelings. The recent twentieth anniversary of 9/11 combined with the effects of living in perpetual lockdown has given us all a moment to reflect. I want our film to encapsulate the universally relevant truths being spoken by the contributors and to create a long-lasting and widespread legacy that will speak to people today, tomorrow and forever.

Bjørn Johnson - Editor’s Statement
Editing this film and working with Ruth Sergel’s incredible ‘Voices of 9/11’ collection was both a joy and a curse. On one hand, I had access to some of the most moving and poignant testimony I had ever worked with, but on the other I was burdened with over a hundred hours of undirected footage, shot on a solitary camera. No pauses, no cutaways and no immediate or obvious through line. The challenge ahead of me felt monumental. But as I began to work with the material, I began to realise that the creative answers lay within those limitations. That the authenticity of our film existed in letting the imperfection of people shine through. We all stumble, we all trip over our words at times and as an editor, I realised that rawness was actually liberating rather than limiting.

This was a transformative moment that allowed me to move away from the typical 9/11 narrative. Archive become subtle, news footage sat back and the 'voices' drove our story. This was especially true when working with the contemporary footage shot in 2021. Despite the added advantage of a second camera, I found myself shying away from using it and that the emotional truth of the people and their remarkable stories lay in my courage to echo the original project wherever possible. By embracing that idea, the single camera ceased to be a curse and instead became a gift.

BIOGRAPHIES:

David Belton
David is an award-winning writer and filmmaker with thirty years’ experience making documentaries and dramas. Between 1990-1996 he made films at BBC Newsnight and BBC Current Affairs, before moving to BBC Documentaries to make several observational documentaries and single narrative films, including his 2006 BAFTA-winning documentary on Vincent Van Gogh. David co-wrote the story and produced the award-winning feature film, Shooting Dogs, with John Hurt and Hugh Dancy - which was partly based on his own experiences covering the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He was subsequently nominated for the Carl Foreman Award at the 2007 Film BAFTAs. He then directed the hit BBC drama series, Ten Days to War, written by Ronan Bennett and starring Kenneth Branagh.

David moved to the U.S., directing the PBS drama-documentary series, God in America and the observational film, The Amish - for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. More recently in the UK, David has made films including Nelson - In His Own Words and Strangeways for BBC-2, Ghosts of the Deep for Channel 4, Captive for Netflix and the recent hit series, This is Football, for Amazon Prime. Prior to Memory Box - Echoes of 9/11, David directed the final episode of BBC-2’s Blair & Brown - the New Labour Revolution. David’s memoir of his experiences covering the Rwandan genocide, When the Hills Ask for your Blood, was published by Doubleday and Black Swan to critical acclaim in 2015.

Bjørn Johnson
Bjørn is an accomplished documentary filmmaker, with over fifteen years’ experience creating films across a broad spectrum of genres. His editorial career began with the BBC where he achieved credits on numerous prime-time scripted dramas, including the political series Party Animals, family favourite Merlin and the BAFTA-nominated Garrow’s Law. In 2006 Bjørn transitioned into documentaries with his work on the award-winning Deep Water. Since then, he has built a reputation for making thought-rovoking films which integrate the idea of dramatic storytelling within a factual narrative; including Race for the White House (CNN) and Pearl Harbor: The Accused (HBO).
Other recent credits include Waco: Madman or essiah (A&E), Bad Sport ‘Hoop Schemes’ and the global hit Don’t F**k with Cats (Netflix). Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11 is his feature directorial debut.