Answering the Call: Ground Zero's Volunteers Reviews

Like thousands of Americans, New Yorkers and outsiders alike, filmmaker and volunteer firefighter Lou Angeli made his way to the World Trade Center in the wake of 9/11. He spent 16 days working at the site, and the footage he shot became a powerful part of this documentary tribute to the EMTs, relief workers, firefighters, K9 handlers, police officers, clergy and private citizens who suspended their everyday lives to clear rubble, douse fires, search for survivors and support exhausted workers. Narrated by Kathleen Turner, the film is divided between images of destruction and Angeli's interviews with a variety of volunteers, from Rev. Milton Williams, pastor of nearby St. Paul's Chapel, to baby-faced musician Gregg Gerson, former drummer for Billy Idol. Their recollections and reflections provide the film's most moving moments: Church worker Verlene Cheeseboro remembers the surreal sight of shoeless, ash-covered women emerging from the cloud of choking dust and debris that enveloped the Trade Center site. Ohio-based volunteer Frank Bardonaro describes the approach to "the pile," as the noxious mountain of debris came to be called, as like leaving the vivid color of Oz for the black-and-white gloom of dustbowl Kansas. Firefighter Michael Higgins, whose firefighter brother died in one of the towers, marvels that when neighboring 7 World Trade Center, damaged but still standing when the first volunteers arrived, finally collapsed, "it came down so quietly." To a man and woman, they remember the chaos that greeted them at the site and their almost overwhelming gratitude to those who lined Manhattan's West Side Highway, the volunteers' route from their staging area to the pile. Their testimony is vivid, direct and heartbreakingly straightforward. Unfortunately, Angeli makes two significant miscalculations: using reenactments (presumably to fill in for images no one captured mid-disaster, which undermines the authenticity of genuine footage; and his single-minded focus on volunteers whose post-9/11 illnesses were treated through the New York Rescue Workers' Detoxification Project, a program developed by "explorer and humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard." Without denigrating the very real contributions of volunteers associated with the controversial Church of Scientology, it seems disingenuous to identify its founder so coyly while neglecting to mention volunteers whose symptoms were relieved through other programs and therapies.