A DRAMA like Mentorn Films’ The Hamburg Cell, on Channel 4 this week, which sees 9/11 through the terrorists’ eyes, was always going to be contentious. The writer, Ronan Bennett, knew it would be tough to get right but thought it was important to go beyond the shorthand descriptions of the hijackers.
“It takes you two minutes of research to realise that phrases like ‘evildoers’ and ‘fanatics’ just won’t do,” he says. He also found that the writing had its tensions: “I was frustrated by the responsibility to the facts and responsibility to the narrative. So we decided that for each scene we’d have to find evidence for it.”
Minor composite characters and inescapable “elements of interpretation” of dialogue aside, the scrupulous approach of Bennett, and the film’s chief researcher and co-writer, Alice Perman, drew Antonia Bird to direct the drama.
Spanning five years and three continents, the film traces, methodically and dispassionately, what drove three of the four 9/11 hijackers, Muslim radicals in Hamburg, to training camps in Afghanistan, pilot lessons across America, and on to their fated flights. Its main focus is Ziad Jarrah, who piloted United Airlines Flight 93, the plane seemingly bound for Washington that crashed in rural Pennsylvania after an assumed passengers’ fight-back.
Unlike the hijackers’ leader, Mohamed Atta, Jarrah was no long-time Islamic firebrand. He arrived in Germany in 1996 from the Lebanon as a secular Muslim and began seeing a Turkish student, Aysel Senguen.
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He was only gradually drawn into the fundamentalist “brotherhood” centred on Hamburg’s Al-Quds Mosque. But he ended up deceiving Aysel — now his widow — his family and sacrificing his life to jihad. On September 11, he called Aysel in Germany from Newark airport, saying only “I love you” three times before hanging up and carrying out his mission.
“I’m Lebanese too and I was really driven by curiosity,” says Karim Salleh, who plays Jarrah on screen. “For me it was about finding the initial Ziad, so I worked towards creating the young Lebanese man in Germany.” It’s a deft answer to the inevitable criticisms of how one can empathise with mass- murdering suicide bombers.
Another controversial issue is the use of stricken Twin Towers footage towards the film’s climax. “I fought hard to keep it,” says Bird. “The idea that Ronan put into the script of showing the towers falling before you got on the plane was so you get over that emotional impact. Then you can think beyond that in the light of the film you’ve seen and everything that’s happened since.”
“Besides,” Perman adds, “the counter-argument that people would say is that we were shying away from the actual reality of what happened on that day.”
Bird and Bennett are quick to credit Channel 4 for their commitment to the film, particularly when the US broadcaster HBO pulled out just before pre-production last August, saying that “the American public was not ready for this film”.
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Now the ongoing debate over Iraq and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 are proof to Bennett that “there’s an appetite for something different”. And not just in America.
“I met a Palestinian guy who saw the film,” says Bird. “He grabbed me by the shoulders and said this needs to be seen in the Middle East. We’ve just been invited to the Venice Film Festival. That will show us if there is an appetite for it.”