9/11 Video Response
The film about the teacher trying to explain the significance of 9/11 to a class of refugee children resinated most with me. Because we first watched the film without subtitles, it was difficult to figure out. There seemed to be a lot of set up to create a full picture of the world that these people were living in. The beginning scenes where the children were making bricks for what I assumed to be houses, were adorable. At first, I thought that the teacher was trying to get the children to recognize that some short time ago 9/11 occurred, but she was unsuccessful because the children were too wrapped up in their own small world. I thought that the message of the film could possibly be that in some parts of the world, the impact of 9/11 was not felt and that it is simply impossible to make someone else truly understand and feel another's pain.
Later, when we watched the film with subtiles I realized that my thinking was somewhat on the right track, but I found a completely different messages. While the adorable children were making bricks for a bomb shelter they were having conversations about death as if it were ritual in daily life. The children's comfortably with death shocked, and even bothered me. What types of circumstances desensitize children to death? When the teacher finally rallies the children for class and is attempting to explain to them that they will have a moment of silence for those who died in 9/11, one girl says that God does not have airplanes so he couldn't have destroyed those people. Other students respond by mentioning other ways that people have died and all of them except one (flood) are man made. This then made me think about the difference of God's power and the power that man posses. Are they different?
Later, when we watched the film with subtiles I realized that my thinking was somewhat on the right track, but I found a completely different messages. While the adorable children were making bricks for a bomb shelter they were having conversations about death as if it were ritual in daily life. The children's comfortably with death shocked, and even bothered me. What types of circumstances desensitize children to death? When the teacher finally rallies the children for class and is attempting to explain to them that they will have a moment of silence for those who died in 9/11, one girl says that God does not have airplanes so he couldn't have destroyed those people. Other students respond by mentioning other ways that people have died and all of them except one (flood) are man made. This then made me think about the difference of God's power and the power that man posses. Are they different?
