Tribeca Review: The Heart of Steel

I saw two documentaries about 9/11 on the same day, as their Tribeca Film Festival press screenings were conveniently scheduled back to back. Though one of them was much better than the other, I figured out that it doesn't matter, because each presents a different story about that horrible day, and each will have their respective effect on their TFF audiences. After all, this is what the film festival, which began because of 9/11, is all about: remembering the tragedy and supporting downtown Manhattan.

The fact that you can walk outside Tribeca Cinemas (which used to be The Screening Room before so many neighborhood businesses went under) and look up at a vacant sky that once was filled with twin towers, should be enough to make anyone forget their cynical "too soon" attitude towards films with 9/11 subject matter. Though I have lived in and around the city all my life, I was not here to experience the date first hand and I'll be the first to admit to being less than soft-hearted about it all, but it is undeniable how intensely the disaster has permeated my being (even the book about rats I'm reading touches on the effects of 9/11). All my efforts to keep an objective, emotional distance from the first film, The Heart of Steel, were not enough to not be taken by its account of extraordinary volunteerism.

The documentary, directed by Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr., focuses on The Renegade Volunteers, everyday citizens who stepped in without authority or direction and got stuff done that nobody else could. They are people who needed to help out and who wouldn't be turned away when officials claimed there wasn't enough work to go around. Each volunteer tells their story directly to the camera, most of them sitting in front of the same star-spangled backdrop, and the events of the day unfold through a quick succession of cuts between them all. It isn't all talking heads, though; many photographs and some video footage of the Jacob Javitz Center, where donations and supplies were coordinated, and Ground Zero are also sporadically included.

For the most part, The Heart of Steel, which was produced through a special partnership with The September 11th Families Association, is an oral history of an aspect of 9/11 that was generalized in the media as something nonchalant and expected, but it works best as a record of emergency response.  The stories told expose the disorder and confusion of immediate disaster relief, including the problems with leadership, communication, organization, sensitivity, bureaucracy and paperwork, accounting and inventory and, most important, assessment of needed materials. Guglielmo, Jr., himself one of the volunteers, has put together a documentary that seems far from thankless, but if it helps the response to future disasters run more smoothly, the film will more than double its importance.

Documentaries about tragedies already are given more respect than dramatizations like United 93, but they suffer more from the belief that such things are unnecessary retreads of emotional moments already depicted to death in the news. The Heart of Steel proves the assumption wrong, though, by adding to what was already known with what still needed to be revealed and understood.