Nine minutes, 11 seconds, one frame.

11"9'01-Septermber 11 Directed by Youssef Chahine, et. al. The French-funded international anthology 11"9'01-September 11 has so many problems in so many ways that it's difficult to list them all here. For starters, it's about the world's response to the attacks of 9/11, probably the most intense hot-button political subject of modern times. Second, it's an anthology project by 11 directors who were all given a theme, a mission statement and a set of technical constraints (which I'll get to in a moment), but who were otherwise left to their own devices.

The directors are Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), Claude Lelouch (France), Youssef Chahine (Egypt), Danis Tanovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Idrissa Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso), Ken Loach (UK), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Mexico), Amos Gitai (Israel), Mira Nair (India), Sean Penn (USA) and Shohei Imamura (Japan). All were given roughly the same budget and confined to exactly the same running time (11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame). Artistic director Alain Brigand's mission statement, reprinted in the press notes, is concise, poetic and grandiose in that very French way: Among other things, it defines the anthology as a work that will "bring reflection to emotion" and "give a voice to all."

Loach either didn't read the memo or chose to ignore the "give voice to all" part. It's a typical Loach screed, a fire-breathing outburst that will likely please those smug lefties-I know many, and even work with a couple-whose immediate reaction to the tragedy was a sense of narcissistic vindication ("America had it coming. I told you this would happen!"). Mixing dramatic and documentary elements, Loach profiles a survivor of the coup of Chilean president Salvador Allende, which was put in place through CIA intervention on Sept. 11, 1973. In a "Dear America" letter, Loach's segment recounts America's history of official treachery and self-interested intervention in the affairs of other countries.

Of course there are the usual disclaimers about how the attacks were horrible and it's a shame so many people lost their lives, but they don't resonate with pure human feeling; like much of Loach's work, even the brilliant stuff, this short reduces warm-blooded, complex human beings to political props that serve the filmmaker's narrow, didactic purposes. With occasional exceptions, Loach doesn't create characters. He uses them, which isn't the same thing. It's a short hop from there to viewing civilians in Manhattan office towers as expendable extensions of Pentagon policy, or average Baghdad citizens as chaff getting in the way of American smart bombs. (Sometimes artists are more similar to the people they hate than they'd like to admit.)

Gitai's contribution is less annoying and blinkered, but also less focused, despite its format-a single, unbroken tracking shot following a hard-driving TV newswoman as she tries to file a live news report about an Israeli marketplace bombing and gets pushed off the airwaves by news of the 9/11 attacks. Gitai's basic point is irrefutable and perhaps obvious: For a while, media coverage of 9/11 pushed other peoples' problems off the world's radar screen. But the whole thing feels like Oliver Stone on a bad day.

Ouedraogo's short, which comes at the same point from a different direction, is the only one that dares to be funny. In a village somewhere in Burkina Faso, a group of poor kids spots a tall Arab who resembles bin Laden and contrives to secretly tape him and collect the reward for evidence leading to his arrest. In its own gentle, nimble way, this short observes that for many people in other countries, 9/11 was a momentary distraction from economic troubles that existed before the attacks and haven't gone away. Tanovic's segment echoes Loach's, but blessedly avoids Loach's ruler-wielding schoolmaster tone. It's set in a small rural village where widows and children gather on the 11th of each month to commemorate the massacre of 7000 of their countrymen beginning on July 11, 1995. It's not the first time that an artist (or historian) has pointed out the bloody significance of days marked by the number 11, but rarely has the point been made so humanely.

Imamura has the most maddening and mysterious segment: a WWII fable about a man who returns from war and finds himself transformed into a snake, to the chagrin of his fellow villagers. Like so much of Imamura's work-and the work of other great Japanese filmmakers-this segment is so deeply enmeshed in its own dreamy symbolism that it may prove almost impenetrable for most Americans. But thinking about it days later, it pleased me; the soldier's transformation could be a metaphor for what war does to otherwise decent men, be they Muslim guerrillas fighting Russians in Afghanistan and then turning their violent skill against Americans, or Americans enraged by Sept. 11 who joined our own military to dish out still-undefined payback in foreign lands.

Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf's segment, which opens the anthology, concentrates on a group of poor Afghan refugee children in Iran being told of the attacks by their schoolteacher, who struggles to explain the concept of skyscrapers to kids who've never seen one; it's a controlled, elliptical piece, with a searing final image of a towering smokestack that evokes you-know-what. Egyptian director Youssef Chahine takes a didactic but personal tack, visualizing a conversation between the director and the ghost of an American serviceman killed in the Beirut barracks bombing of 1983, and a woman he secretly loved.

Nair, perhaps one of the world's most artistically underrated commercial filmmakers, expertly walks the tightrope separating political activism and human drama with a docudrama based on a true New York story: In the days following Sept. 11, FBI agents harassed a family of Muslims from New York whose son had gone missing on the day of the attacks, implying that he was in league with bin Laden. (It later turned out that he died trying to save people at Ground Zero.) Penn's segment is the most overtly sentimental. In a small apartment near Ground Zero, an old man (Ernest Borgnine) fails to notice the attacks because he's too busy grieving over his dead wife. The direction is imprecise, the final image is at once enchanting and reductive, and Borgnine has been encouraged to over-emote. But I still liked this segment quite a bit; if both actor and director go too far, at least they have the guts to be emotionally naked as they do it.

Best of show goes to Inarritu. His is the only segment that I can't stop thinking about, and I suspect anyone who was in New York on Sept. 11 will feel the same way. Junking documentary and narrative techniques of every type, he instead embraces an experimental cinema vibe, assembling a frighteningly trancelike piece in which a black screen is occasionally interrupted by strobe-flash glimpses of bodies falling from the towers. The soundtrack is a mix of chantlike music and radio reports, reminiscent of the audio track in last year's daringly controlled experimental documentary WTC Uncut. Each glimpse of a falling body lasts just a few frames, yet the effect is far more powerful than if the footage had been used (or exploited) at length. The short is vague and exact all at once; miraculously, it simulates memory as we experience it-especially memories of violence. The horror jabs at the corners of our waking life like needles. Inarritu's art makes us flinch. Real art always does.