The voice is monotonous and quickly echoes a host of information and questions. Why is the impact on the Pentagon building so small? Who could have benefited from the movements on the New York Stock Exchange just before the attacks? How can an ultra-strong building collapse in seconds?
The film that asks all these questions – and many others – about the attacks of September 11, 2001, is Loose Change (” Small change “). Distributed only through the Internet when it was released in 2005, this documentary made with ridiculous means became in a few months what the magazine Vanity Fair will call “The first blockbuster of the Internet”. In a few months, tens of millions of people watched the film, quickly translated and subtitled in several languages by volunteers.
Loose Change becomes one of the central pillars of the protean movement of “Truthers”, literally the “seekers of truth”, who believe that the American government lied about the attacks, or even that it was behind them. Loose Change does not favor a particular hypothesis about what would have really happened – it only does ” To ask questions “ and incites, in conclusion, its spectators to “Ask for answers”.
The voice that asks these questions and asks for these answers, during the short hour that the film lasts, is that of Dylan Avery, its director. Barely 22 years old when he published the first version of Loose Change, the latter had not initially imagined a documentary filmmaker: his first idea was to make a fiction, an action film revolving around the idea that September 11 was the result of an American conspiracy. Too expensive for a young man who had failed the film school competition he wanted to do and was working at the time as a waiter for a chain of restaurants. By documenting himself to write his screenplay, Dylan Avery has an enlightenment: what if the plot really exists? The young man begins to accumulate images, on VHS, of the collapse of the towers and decides to make Loose Change a documentary.
Themes far removed from conspiracy theories
The first edits of the film cross the planet by post, all the way to Iraq, to land in the hands of Mr. Avery’s best friend, Korey Rowe, who will be the producer of the film. Like all Americans, Mr. Rowe vividly remembers where he was when the Twin Towers fell. On September 11, 2001, he was on his first day of training with the US Army, in which he had just joined. His unit will be sent ten days later to Iraq, then to Afghanistan.
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