I felt a responsibility to try to fill that void and try
to give kids something that isn’t horrifying and
kind of fills in the gap.”
The half-hour film debuted Wednesday. A
companion piece, focusing on the memories of
former students at a high school near Ground
Zero, premieres three hours later.
Schatz has made a specialty of creating films
that seek to explain the inexplicable, with “The
Number on Great-Grandpa’s Arm” tackling
the Holocaust and another on the Parkland
shooting. “I’m really desperate for some more
lightness very soon,” she said.
In this case, she worked with the Sept. 11
remembrance museum on the story, filming
two men who work there giving presentations
to third graders. Stephen Kern, who worked on
the 62nd floor of the World Trade Center’s North
Tower, talks about being evacuated. Matthew
Crawford, whose father was a firefighter who
died that day, discusses his experience. She also
found a middle school in Secaucus, New Jersey,
that teaches history through art and poetry,
helping students process the emotions of what
they learned.
Short history lessons are sprinkled throughout
the film, about New York and the World Trade
Center, the one-time tallest towers in the world.
Construction began in 1968.
“One of the biggest questions the kids have
is ’why? ‘Why would somebody do that? Why
would there be such cruelty?’” she said. “That’s a
very difficult thing to grapple with and answer
so that was the trickiest part of the project.”
The film tells of Osama bin Laden and his
activism that started with the Soviet Union’s