The first feature film to address the events of Sept. 11 opened in New York on Wednesday, leaving some audience members sobbing and the rest in shocked silence.
United 93, by the British director Paul Greengrass, opened the Tribeca Film Festival, and the evening began like any other premiere, with a red-carpet procession of celebrities -- including Robert De Niro, Steve Buscemi and Gabriel Byrne -- and attendant TV cameras and gawking passers-by.
But joining them in the 1,600-capacity Ziegfeld Theater was a group who gave the event a more somber tone: about 90 people who lost family members when a United Airlines plane crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, killing all 33 passengers and seven crew members, as well as the four hijackers. The relatives were given a standing ovation after Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the festival with De Niro, said she hoped the film could be part of a "healing journey."
The film is a documentary-style recreation of what Greengrass calls a "believable truth" about what might have happened on the plane and in air-traffic control centers -- from the moment a controller hears the first indications of the hijacks to when the Flight 93 passengers storm the cockpit and try to seize control.
Many of the actors were at the premiere, but Lewis Alsamari, the British-based Iraqi actor who plays hijacker Saeed al-Ghamdi, was refused a visa to enter the US. The American embassy in London gave no reason for its decision. He will see the film for the first time at a private screening in the UK in the next few days.
An international media watchdog on Wednesday accused China of kidnapping a filmmaker who was arrested while making a documentary on underground churches and whose family has received no word on him.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said it considered Wu Hao, who is also a Beijing blogger, a victim of state abduction as more than two months had passed since his arrest by State Security Bureau officials in Beijing, without any notification to his family.
His lawyer had not been allowed to see him but had been told his client was under a form of house arrest, Hao's sister Wu Na had said in her blog.
RSF said Wu Hao's whereabouts were unknown.
"This case shows the Chinese security services operate without any control by the courts," RSF said in a statement. "Hao is the victim of an arbitrary system that interprets the law as it sees fit."
China's government views director John Woo's (
Terence Chang said Beijing is treating Battle of Red Cliff, starring Chow Yun-fat (周潤發), as a marketing device for the 2008 Olympic Games.
``This movie has government backing. The government is taking it seriously because they want us to release it before the 2008 Olympics,'' Chang said on the sidelines of a film finance forum in Hong Kong.
The movie is a co-production between the state-owned China Film Group and Woo's Los Angeles-based Lion Rock Productions, which Chang helps run.
Woo aims to start filming, mainly in the northern Hebei province, in March next year.
American actor Viggo Mortensen will team up again with Canadian director David Cronenberg, who directed him in A History of Violence, for an action flick set in London, the entertainment press reported Tuesday.
RSS