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The Hamburg Cell Overview

"If there is a more important, more urgent story to be told than this, I can’t think of it." —The Guardian (U.K.)

In this daring dramatization of events leading up to 9/11, director Antonia Bird (Face, Priest) casts her bold, unblinking lens on the roots of extremism. You meet a small band of middle-class students who commit themselves to the unconscionable: Ziad Jarrah (Karim Saleh), the confused and ultimately duplicitous lover and husband; Mohamed Atta (Kamel), the stern, puritanical enforcer, seething with hate; and Ramzi bin al Shibh (Omar Berdouni), the fanatic recruiter for violent martyrdom.

Based on exhaustive research, including personal interviews, unpublished correspondence, and the official 9/11 Commission Report, the film offers a coldly detached yet unnervingly intimate study of young men who turned themselves into monsters. What’s more, it reveals the many instances when they might have been stopped.

The Hamburg Cell Specifications

The Hamburg Cell, a low-key British film full of unknown actors, may be one of the best movies about the World Trade Center attacks. The movie follows Ziad Jarrah (Karim Saleh), a mild middle-class Arab student in Germany, who is drawn into a radical form of Islam by the heated atmosphere of anger and frustration sparked by the violence in the Arab world and what the clerics and students see as corrupt decadence all around them in the West. Gradually, despite a deep relationship with a liberal-minded Turkish woman (Agni Scott), Jarrah sheds his doubts about his cause; he undergoes military training in Afghanistan and goes to a flight school in Florida, finally ending up on one of the doomed flights of 9/11. Director Antonia Bird, director of the controversial Priest, guides her actors to quiet but natural and compelling performances. For American citizens, it may feel like the movie doesn't present a compelling reason why a seemingly mild and thoughtful student would transform into a committed terrorist; but in other parts of the world, where America--rightly or wrongly--is seen as a bully and a profiteer, the leap from bystander to killer may be all too easy to grasp. A quiet, mesmerizing, and valuable film. --Bret Fetzer

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