{"id":833297,"date":"2026-09-01T18:28:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T18:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/833297\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T18:28:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T18:28:12","slug":"led-us-down-such-a-dark-path-documentary-explores-how-9-11-changed-america-documentary-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/833297\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Led us down such a dark path\u2019: documentary explores how 9\/11 changed America | Documentary films"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty-five years on, memory is giving way to history. Soon the US will cross the point where half its population were born after 11 September 2001<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I do that math, I get to the bomb at Hiroshima \u2013 that\u2019s how distant it is,\u201d says Brian Knappenberger, 56, director of a new Netflix documentary, Turning Point: Generation 9\/11<\/a>. \u201cWhen we talk about the second world war, for our generation it seemed like a long time ago but, for the current generation of 20-year-olds, that\u2019s how long ago it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having previously made series about the \u201cwar on terror\u201d, cold war and Vietnam war, Knappenberger felt compelled to address a generation for whom 9\/11 is an abstraction they might find in a school history textbook, a solemn annual ceremony or, most disorientingly, a meme circulating on TikTok and Instagram.<\/p>\n

Speaking via Google Meet from Los Angeles, he adds: \u201cThis 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 maybe more than the events themselves \u2013 changed us as a country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, Knappenberger\u2019s film captures a paradox: even as 9\/11 fades from living memory, we are still living in a vividly 9\/11 world. \u201cWe are at a place where it is moving into distant history. But I would like people to understand what we went through and record in a documentary what those decisions did to us \u2013 and ask what kind of country we want to be.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Turning Point: Generation 9\/11 follows in a long line of documentaries recounting the horror of a day that killed nearly 3,000 people<\/a>: 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.<\/p>\n

For older generations, it is a day when everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing. \u201c9\/11 changed my life,\u201d Knappenberger reflects. \u201cIt changed how I saw the world. It changed how I saw the political system in the United States. It changed the course of my career. It\u2019s hard to even describe with hindsight how profound of a change this was.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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 \u201ccollateral\u201d in a narrative that consumed her family.<\/p>\n

She confides: \u201cI know he was a hero but I wish he didn\u2019t have to be \u2026 My entire life was kind of built around this. I\u2019m just still struggling so much and it has taken over, like, my whole life.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

There is also An Nguyen, whose father, Khang Nguyen<\/a> \u2013 an immigrant who grew up amid the Vietnam war before emigrating to the US \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Knappenberger observes: \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

To view the modern US information ecosystem through the eyes of these families exposes the depth of contemporary political cynicism, he continues. There has been \u201cmemeification\u201d of the event, where conspiracy theories and jokes about Osama bin Laden<\/a> or George W Bush<\/a> circulate on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.<\/p>\n

More perniciously, the \u201ctruther\u201d movement<\/a> rejects the official account of 9\/11 in favour of conspiracy theories, including that it was orchestrated by the US government itself.<\/p>\n

The director says: \u201c9\/11 gave birth to the truther movement \u2013 this incredibly dark movement that rises in a disinformation environment, claiming 9\/11 wasn\u2019t real or that jet fuel can\u2019t burn steel, that it was an inside job. When you look at these disinformation campaigns through the eyes of children who actually lost loved ones, that makes it even more profound and telling.\u201d<\/p>\n

An Nguyen in Turning Point: Generation 9\/11. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix<\/p>\n

Knappenberger traces a thread from early conspiracy theories to today\u2019s fractured political reality. \u201cThere is a direct line from the early 9\/11 truther movement through all of the rise of conspiracy theories online, and a direct connection from that to figures like Alex Jones<\/a>, who became a leading figure in the movement, all the way through the disinformation and misinformation that we see now that divides and tears our country apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

The timing proved fateful. Facebook launched in 2004, Reddit in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. \u201cThese platforms were coming of age right in the shadow of 9\/11 and so you had this massive rise of conspiracy theories and this new technology and ways we\u2019re communicating on social media happening at the same time. I don\u2019t think you can separate these things. The truther movement is an early predecessor to some of the chaotic world of misinformation that we see now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The domestic fallout of September 11 was not confined to the internet. The film tracks how the institutional apparatus constructed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks permanently altered civil liberties at home. It visits Brooklyn\u2019s \u201cLittle Pakistan\u201d to capture the experience of shopkeepers and families who lived the American dream before 2001, only to find their neighbourhoods subjected to FBI monitoring, harassment and suspicion almost overnight.<\/p>\n

Knappenberger highlights the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the subsequent formation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which, under Donald Trump, has been widely condemned for its aggressive enforcement tactics and arrests of people without criminal records in cities such as Minneapolis.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe violence we see ICE perpetrating on the streets of America has a direct line to 9\/11,\u201d he says. \u201cWe became fearful and suspicious of Muslim communities in America, and that infrastructure we built needed another place to go, and it continued. That fear dominates us and politicians have capitalised on that fear in order to get elected and to get power.\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds: \u201cThere\u2019s no question that when you see violence on the streets of America perpetrated by ICE, that is a shock of 9\/11. That is the wave of violence that started on 9\/11 and a direct result of decisions that were made then. This is a choice about who are we as Americans, what\u2019s important to us and what do we do moving forward. There\u2019s a new generation who will start to have to answer those questions for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US has also projected violence abroad over the past quarter of a century at a cost of millions of lives. The foundational pillar of the \u201cforever wars\u201d was erected just three days after the twin towers fell when Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)<\/a> with only a single dissenting vote. Intended to target al-Qaida and those who harboured them, the statute became an elastic legal justification for military interventions, drone campaigns and indefinite detentions across sovereign nations spanning four presidential administrations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe created this thing called the AUMF, which is about as simple as it gets,\u201d Knappenberger says. \u201cThat\u2019s simply not how it works or the way our country was set up. It\u2019s pretty clear in the constitution that Congress determines if we get a war or not. After 230 years at that point of being a country, of having a constitution, we decided after 9\/11 that we weren\u2019t going to do that any more. We decided we\u2019re going to defer that in these cases to the president \u2013 not at all how the founders of this country saw our government working.\u201d<\/p>\n

The long-term consequence, Knappenberger argues, has been a dangerous expansion of executive power. \u201cThat was meant to go after al-Qaida, the people that attacked us on 9\/11, and it has morphed into the rationale behind lots of other wars that we\u2019ve engaged in. In that sense we\u2019re still feeling the effects of the \u2018war on terror\u2019 in the way that it shifted power in the United States to the executive.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt said now the president gets to decide if we\u2019re engaging in these wars or not. That\u2019s a huge difference in how America is supposed to operate. In that sense we\u2019re definitely very much feeling the effects of the \u2018war on terror\u2019 still \u2013 this nebulous war on terror that can be applied and used as a justification for all these other wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

The World Trade Center on 9\/11. Photograph: Hubert Michael Boesl\/EPA<\/p>\n

If 9\/11 was the opening salvo of a new geopolitical era, the chaotic August 2021 evacuation from Hamid Karzai international airport in Kabul after a 20-year war in Afghanistan was the closing of a chapter. The mission suffered a disaster when an Isis-K suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest at Abbey Gate<\/a>, killing 13 US service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians.<\/p>\n

Knappenberger weaves the harrowing experiences of young US marines stationed at Abbey Gate into the narrative. They describe the strange experience of having to coordinate security with the Taliban \u2013 the very enemy the US had invaded to depose two decades earlier.<\/p>\n

Knappenberger says: \u201cIt didn\u2019t seem possible that we would still have troops in Afghanistan 20 years after 9\/11, especially with how fast the Taliban was driven out. Here we are 20 years after that with a new generation of people: some weren\u2019t born, some were too young to remember 9\/11. They are the ones closing it out in those final harrowing days and of course 13 people were killed in that bombing. It\u2019s profound and on the Taliban side you have people who were also not born yet or were too young to remember the events of that day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alongside the US military trauma, the film foregrounds the plight of Afghan allies who placed their faith in the United States. One former Afghan military pilot, Obaidullah Durani, recounts securing evacuation for his two children to Arizona while his sick wife, Shafaro, was separated from them<\/a> and left behind under Taliban rule, fracturing the family.<\/p>\n

For Knappenberger, the visual parallels between Kabul in 2021 and Saigon in 1975 represent an indictment. \u201cOne season of Turning Point was about the Vietnam war <\/a>and you saw people who believed in the American cause fleeing in fear for their lives at the end of that war. Many people thought this was a tragedy that we should never repeat as a country but it\u2019s something that very much was repeated when the United States left Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the course of 20 years, the United States did some good things in Afghanistan, but when we left so many people who bought into the idea of a new society ended up running for their lives. When you look at history, you think: how do we do this twice? There is no more stark example of the ineffectiveness of these efforts than the fact that these images look almost identical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back across a quarter-century defined by overseas conflict, the erosion of institutional trust, rising domestic division under Trump and military operations launched without congressional authorisation, Knappenberger goes back to the strategy articulated by Bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cOsama bin Laden knew that that they couldn\u2019t take on or destroy America; they couldn\u2019t go to war and hurt that many Americans ultimately. He was aware that they could cause America to devour itself, that there was a way of getting America so involved in these other wars and to divide America within.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat would be a way of destroying America that would be far beyond any kind of terrorist attack. He saw the way to destroy America was to turn it against itself and in that sense it\u2019s hard to overstate the profound effect those actions had on us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knappenberger is left with questions and the hope that those born after 9\/11 will make a different choice. \u201cWho is an American, what is an American, how do we welcome people into our society? Those decisions were made out of fear and they were made out of suspicion, and they changed who we were. We are a different country after 9\/11 than we were before. I would like the next generation to not fall into the fear and suspicion that led us down such a dark path.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty-five years on, memory is giving way to history. Soon the US will cross the point where half…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":833298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-833297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=833297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/833297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/833298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=833297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=833297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=833297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}