7 Days in September

An almost unbearably powerful documentary.

If ever there was a prime example of art bringing order out of chaos, it is Steven Rosenbaum's 7 Days in September. -- The result is a narrative at once personal, admirably coherent and, above all, heartening.

The film may be rife with emotional declarations, but rather than the studied sentiments of news anchors and politicians, these ruminations have the quotidian ring of real people struggling with a standard vocabulary to describe something unthinkably new.

There's nothing here for commercial reality-TV shows, just history caught on the run, offering a raw and timeless reminder of the day we had our eyes opened to the power of blind hatred.

Especially well-rendered is the divide that occurred between the downtown and uptown worlds -- something that many who don't live in New York will grasp here for the first time.

The interviews occasionally veer into it-seemed-like-a-dream cliché, and the eerie soundtrack doesn't help. But at times the unpolished approach earns a rare complexity.

While it's crucial to preserve and make available every bit of available footage of such an earth-shattering event, it must be said that Rosenbaum's film manages to become slack and uninvolving after a while.