A New Documentary Checks In with Children Born In the Months After Their Fathers Died on 9/11
For roughly 100 children, the 9/11 terrorist attacks prevented them from ever meeting their fathers. These kids, born in the months after the attacks, are now freshmen in college, and each has grappled with their grief in a different way. The new documentary, Generation 9/11, follows seven of these young adults, as they reflect on their common tragedy and how it shaped their upbringings. Six of them grew up in America and one, Fares Malahi, came of age in Yemen. They have different political beliefs, wide-ranging interests, and span the country in location; however, they are all united by this loss.
Director Liz Mermin spoke with T&C about the film's two parallel stories—growing up with a father who passed in 9/11 and coming of age in the 21st century. Watch an exclusive clip from the documentary above. And, below, Mermin discusses the multifaceted nature of this story, and what we can take away from it.
What was the process behind choosing which kids to follow?
[There was] a desire for diversity, not in the political sense of diversity, but people who had been based in the different locations where people were lost during the attacks: on the planes and in the World Trade Center, in the Pentagon; people with different levels of jobs from Dina [Retik]'s father [who] was a high-powered consultant to Claudia [Szurkowski]’s father who was doing wallpaper and building maintenance.
The biggest factor was looking for people who really wanted to do [the documentary]. The kids had to be interested in taking this whole journey. We knew we were going to be asking a lot of them. They had to film a lot; they had to really open up they had to really think deeply, and not give us clichés—be really willing to look into their emotions and their experiences, and also be willing to talk about the world around them in a frank, open way.
Did you know going in how large of a role the kids' families would play in the documentary?
Initially, that was part of the whole offering was, “We need you and we also need your family to be part of this.”
I was really amazed at how open [the families] were in the interviews. Every one of the mothers, or in Luke [Taylor]'s case, his adopted mother and father, were so willing to go back to that place in a way that I wasn't sure we could expect, and I found their testimony to be incredibly moving. The other thing that was really powerful was seeing the kids listen to their mothers or their parents tell these stories, because for a lot of them, they hadn't done that, they hadn't ever sat there and heard the whole thing before, so to be able to capture that moment was quite profound.
What do you think was added to the documentary by having the subjects be children of expectant fathers, rather than other kids who lost parents in the attacks?
It's this question of how you grieve something you never knew. For some of them, the sense of loss is deeper, because, even if their older siblings don't really remember their parents, at least they seem to find some comfort in the knowledge that maybe there's a few photos or there's some sort of physical connection that happened. Not that that makes it easy, but it's different.
Luke at one point says it's almost like mourning a distant relative; it feels weird [to him]. And Megan [Fehling] also [says], “I feel like it's not really my tragedy.” And this sense of how you grieve something that's so intimate to you, yet, completely outside your experience, was something we wanted to explore, through hearing how the kids articulated that experience and how they come to find meaning in it. Some of them have searched to create a relationship [with their fathers], even though a real relationship was never possible, and others say, “How could you ever have a relationship? I'm not going there. That's not how I see it.” And I was really interested in the variety of responses that they had.
There is such a wide range in how the different kids process their grief. Did you anticipate that going in?
I don't think so. I'm not sure I knew what to expect. We thought that some of them, like Ronald [Milam, Jr.] and Megan, who were more distanced from [their grief], would show more of a response as they talked to their mothers about it and went further. It was really interesting to see that they didn't. Their coping mechanism and their way of understanding it is [that] they have a sense of a boundary between their experience and their father and that the loss is absolute and that there is no point in dwelling on that.
I didn't expect that to be so firmly established. I think there's some sort of pop psychology expectation that if you scratch the surface, you’ll get some deep reaction, but they've been coping with this situation all of their lives and their way of coping is to see it as something they can do nothing about, and they look forward, not back. Whereas for others, the grieving and creating a relationship is really important. Claudia and Dina, who's sort of in between, are more expected. Although, as I say that, Megan [with her poem] has these moments where she acknowledges a bit of grief, but it's always more through her creative expression than anything she'll actually articulate.
The documentary also touches on current events, from gun control to climate change. What was the decision making process behind including these subjects?
The thing that was challenging about this film is it is two stories in parallel. One is the story of loss and grief, and the other is the story of what it's like to grown up in this post-9/11 world—this first generation of 21st century natives, and the madness of the last 20 years, unified by some sense of whether their experience of grief and loss has affected the way they see the other traumas that everyone in their generation has been living through. I made a list of all the big things that have happened in the past 20 years, and I asked them to respond.
They all claimed to remember nothing, but once you started talking about specific school shootings—that's one thing that everybody had something to say about. The death of [Osama] bin Laden, obviously, they all remember where they were when that happened. But, [these questions had] a sense of what do you make of the world that you've been left, and we asked them about loads of different things and we took the most interesting responses. Obviously, Covid and Black Lives Matter and the increased polarization of our politics—that was the thing that they all had the most to say about, just in terms of what they found depressing. The pessimistic sentiments were always around division.
What were what were some of the major through lines that you wanted to emphasize in all the stories?
To some extent, it was a portrait of 21st [century] American teens. So, some of it was just rites of passage, like learning to drive and leaving home and your first memory and touchstones that would give a portrait of what it's like to be 19 in America now. And then, with Fares, a bit of a contrast of what it was like to be to be those ages in Yemen.
But then the other themes, in parallel, the 9/11 themes are: What's it like to grow up as the 9/11 kid? What's it like to have the media attention? What's it like to feel everyone's eyes on you in school when they talk about it? How does that shape you? And how do you learn to deal with it? And then how has your perspective on loss and all the tragedy—how has it changed as you become a young adult? So, it was looking to chart that evolution, their personal evolution in parallel with the history of the last 20 years in America.
There was also a lot of levity in the film. How did you balance that with this extremely tragic moment in these kids’ lives?
There have been plenty of films about the victims of 9/11, people who lost family members, and I've seen quite a few of them, and I don't particularly like being made to be miserable—staring at someone else's grief for two hours—I'm not quite sure what the point of that is. While there are moments that are incredibly moving, it was also important to show that these kids have their own lives and their own personalities and part of the reason we chose them is that they're funny, and they're sharp, and they're smart.
The [footage] they filmed themselves on their phones was so important in reminding you these are teens. They aren't letting this tragedy dampen their whole lives or define them. They've got the moments when they can reflect on it, but then they're also just silly kids and shouldn't be seen as anything else, because that's what they are. As a filmmaker, you want that balance of lightness and humor. Every film I've made I make sure has humor in it, because I think that's how you keep people engaged and you remind them that these aren't just victims or people who have been through something awful. They're people like you and I, and you can laugh with them.
Generation 9/11 premieres on PBS, Tuesday, August 31, 2021 at 9 p.m. ET. Check your local listings.
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