Site (2002) User Reviews

This is the 9/11 film that everyone would be better off for seeing.

[abbyzsmith · 9/10 · 3 July 2002]

There are so many 9/11 documentaries and tributes out there. I've been addicted to watching them, even though I feel most of them say the same thing and I don't learn or feel anything new. While all of them are important testimonies, none are as authentic, as visceral, as beautiful as SITE in my opinion. This film works both as a piece of art and as an honest documentary that illustrates a moment in time without making judgement or injecting excessive or superficial emotion into it. It's haunting and peaceful. It's beautiful and tragic. It's that nameless feeling that we all felt at some point post 9/11. I was really impressed with the "hands off" feeling the filmmaker used that made it feel like the audience's film while watching it, versus the interpretation of a director. We become the faces we are watching. We identify and empathize with all of them and we feel how truly human we all are.

Haunting and powerful. You'll never forget SITE after

[wassermanjohn · 12 February 2002]

you've seen it. Against a classical ballad for 5-10 minutes, you watch an extreme close-up of men, women and children as they witness the devastation at Ground Zero for the first time. I was compelled to go to the September 11 screening at Sundance because I'm a New Yorker living in L.A. and I was curious to see what New York artists, not the media, had to say about it. And I was concerned that it might feel opportunist or sentimental, (and a few of the pieces were in my opinion), but SITE feels very hands off, very authentic--it doesn't manipulate its subject, it just respectfully captures it. We never actually see Ground Zero in the short, and because of it, it is somehow more compelling, perhaps because it becomes more tangible. We see the faces and we can empathize with these people's very human emotions ( even if not the same as our own) rather have the interference of the site itself, which forces us back to that place where we try to comprehend the extent and or meaning of the event itself.