They are around 20 and lost their fathers in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001: Seven young women and men report what it is like to have grown up in a 9/11 family.
New York – 20 years have passed since Islamist terror killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. Many pregnant wives were among the bereaved.
Their children did not get to know their fathers and did not experience the attacks in which they were killed. Nevertheless, the events of this September day shape the lives of today’s young adults. For the two-part documentary “Generation 9/11”, seven children of victims give an insight into their thoughts and feelings.
Grief from the start
It is an extraordinary perspective from which the director Liz Mermin looks at 9/11: Luke, Dina, Ronald and Meghan are united in their fate. They grew up in 9/11 families and were confronted with grief for a man they never met: their father. In front of the camera, they tell how they found out about their own story and what role their father plays for them.
Hardly a day goes by without thinking of their father, they say. Dina tells with tears in her eyes that she feels guilty if she has not thought of him for a few days. Public commemorations were just as much a part of everyday life for 9/11 children as other people’s questions about their fathers.
Excerpts from private video recordings show the children at happy family celebrations, and their mothers, grandparents or older siblings also have their say. The view also goes to the future: Ronald is doing medical training, Luke wants to be a soldier, Claudia is studying law.
Giving the victims a face
At the same time, the protagonists reflect on political and social developments in their home country: the handling of weapons, for example, which led to test alarms for rampages being routine during their school days; growing racism and the Black Lives Matter movement; the corona pandemic; the Trump presidency and the storming of the Washington Capitol earlier this year.
Liz Mermin’s team has succeeded in creating a remarkable documentary that gives some of the victims of September 11 a face and traces how their bereaved relatives have tried to come to terms with the trauma and have realigned their lives – and to whom their dead husbands and sons are a special gift left behind: a (grand) child. dpa
