Park City, Utah — The morning of Sept. 11, filmmaker Etienne Sauret was on the streets of lower Manhattan documenting the horror of the World Trade Center attack.
Barely a week later, documentary director Deborah Shaffer began a portrait on how the attacks affected the lives and work of 10 New York City artists. Eleven days after the tragedy, director Danny Schechter was in a recording studio, taping footage on an all-star session to create a new version of the pop hit "We Are Family," from which proceeds are going to organizations helping Sept. 11 victims.
Their works and films by two other directors were compiled in a 2 1/2-hour screening for audiences at the Sundance Film Festival, a first wave of films on a subject that undoubtedly will preoccupy documentary filmmakers for decades.
"It's like the first drop of what's bound to become a flood," said Shaffer, whose film opens the program, which debuted last weekend and has its final Sundance screening today.
Shaffer's "From the Ashes: 10 Artists" is a 56-minute exploration of painters, musicians, and others as they resume their art and lives. Some were displaced from homes and studios, returning to apartments coated in ash. Some lost friends, including an artist who apparently decided to sleep over Sept. 10 in his work studio on the 92nd floor of the trade center and died there the next day.
Schechter's hour-long "We Are Family" chronicles producer-songwriter Nile Rodgers' re-recording of the hit tune, featuring 200 voices, among them Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick, Run DMC and Sister Sledge.
Three short films round out the program. Sauret spent the day after the towers collapsed shooting "The First 24 Hours," a riveting collection of images from the trade center ruins and surrounding areas. The film is presented with only ambient noise and scattered conversation. It ends with a rescue worker calling "Hello?" into a pile of rubble.
"Voice of the Prophet," directed by Robert Edwards, is a chilling interview done in 1998 by Richard Rescorla, a security chief at the trade center. A Vietnam combat veteran, Rescorla details his own bloody battle experiences then theorizes how the new age of terrorism could bring conventional military forces to their knees.
Jason Kliot's "Site" is a simple, stirring series of tight close-ups of the faces of New Yorkers staring toward the zone where the trade center stood. The film closes with a shot of a woman whose face is consumed by grief.
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