This film will tell the story of the most unforgettable image from 9/11 – a photograph of a falling man, a jumper from the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, frozen in mid-air, perfectly parallel against the lines of those sun-kissed buildings.
The image ran in newspapers and magazines across the world over the following week, and should have remained the defining image of that terrible day. Instead, it was quickly airbrushed out of history. Why?
This film follows the trail of that photograph – of the photographer who shot it, of the citizens who decried it, of the editors who published it and then banned it, of the journalist who tried to identify the figure, of the wife and daughters ‘accused’ of being his family, and finally of the writer who confronted America with it in an award-winning magazine article.
To follow that trail, the film takes the audience back to the events of that day from the point of view of those stranded on the top floors of the World Trade Centre, evoking the horror of what it must have been like inside those buildings after the planes had hit.
As a result, the film’s overarching narrative – the trail of the photograph – also includes the narrative of the 102 minutes from the time the first plane hit the North Tower at 8.46 through to the second plane hitting the South Tower at 9.59, its collapse at 10.56 and the North Tower’s collapse at 10.28.
Up until that point, the horrifying thud of the jumpers hitting the ground continued – sometimes in clumps, sometimes individually.
