Soon the US will cross the point where half its population were born after 11 September 2001 or were too young to remember the day that terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in northern Virginia and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Speaking via Google Meet from Los Angeles, he adds: “This film is coming from a place of respecting that experience, not assuming that people understand what it felt like to live through 9/11, which is so ingrained to those of us that did. It’s to illustrate not just what terrorism meant and how frightening that was but also how the decisions made in the days and weeks and years that followed – maybe more than the events themselves – changed us as a country.” Indeed, Knappenberger’s film captures a paradox: even as 9/11 fades from living memory, we are still living in a vividly 9/11 world.
But I would like people to understand what we went through and record in a documentary what those decisions did to us – and ask what kind of country we want to be.” Turning Point: Generation 9/11 follows in a long line of documentaries recounting the horror of a day that killed nearly 3,000 people: the morning TV shows jarringly interrupted, the trapped office workers, the final phone calls, the heroic firefighters, the falling towers, the dust-coated commuters, the sombre presidential address. For older generations, it is a day when everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing. It changed how I saw the political system in the United States.
It changed the course of my career. It’s hard to even describe with hindsight how profound of a change this was.” But for anyone born in the late 1990s or later, 9/11 feels like an inheritance. The documentary focuses on young people whose entire lives were directly shaped by the catastrophe.
Among them is Laurel Homer, whose father, LeRoy Homer, was the co-pilot of United Flight 93. Laurel was just 10 months old when her father and passengers fought back against hijackers over Shanksville. In the film, she describes feeling like “collateral” in a narrative that consumed her family.
She confides: “I know he was a hero but I wish he didn’t have to be … My entire life was kind of built around this. I’m just still struggling so much and it has taken over, like, my whole life.” Grieving a father she never knew, Laurel finds herself confronting strangers online who send callous direct messages or peddle conspiracy theories claiming the tragedy was an elaborate inside job. There is also An Nguyen, whose father, Khang Nguyen – an immigrant who grew up amid the Vietnam war before emigrating to the US – was killed while working as an electrical engineer at the Pentagon.
An was four years old when his father ran out to kiss him goodbye at the preschool bus on that Tuesday morning, never to return. Knappenberger observes: “It’s incredibly profound to understand what the children of people who lost their parents, lost their loved ones on 9/11, went through on those days. But it’s more profound when you think about how it changed their lives and those events have stayed with them through the evolution that our country also went through.” To view the modern US information ecosystem through the eyes of these families exposes the depth of contemporary political cynicism, he continues.
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