Pilot 9/11 – the story about coming out of trauma
Pilot 9/11 presents the events of 11 September 2001 from the unique perspective of military aviators who followed the hijacked passenger planes to prevent the tragedy. The assessment from their point of view sheds new light on the perfectly familiar images. The cramped cockpit of the plane contrasting with the boundless expanse of New York is the perfect environment for VR recreation. Although we are almost in the centre of events, we remain locked in the cockpit, like powerless observers. How do you remain fully focused and decisive while seeing desperate pleas for rescue and watching – without being able to help – the horror of scenes taking place just a few hundred metres away? Yet what happened at the World Trade Center is not, despite appearances, the main focus. Pilot 9/11 is a twenty-minute story about coming out of trauma – the wider, national one, and the subjective, personal one.
Norman Leto (born ?ukasz Banach) – painter, director, new media artist. His first solo exhibition took place at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in 2007. In 2009 and 2010, he completed his autobiographical novel Sailor and a full-length film under the same title. In 2012 Leto began work on Photon, his second feature film, which premiered at the international documentary film festivals CPH:DOX, Copenhagen 2017 and HotDocs, Toronto 2017, and had its Polish premiere at the 17th IFF T-Mobile New Horizons in the main competition. In 2017, Leto began work on the script for his new film Pilot 9/11, about the 9/11 terrorist attack as seen from the unique perspective of a real military pilot who tried to prevent the tragedy.