TELLING NICHOLAS (TV)
Summary
This documentary deals with the reluctance of Robert Lanza to tell his seven-year-old son Nicholas that the boy's mother Michele has been killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The film opens with images of the flaming towers under narration from filmmaker James Ronald Whitney, who explains that the footage was shot from his loft space just under the Twin Towers. After the towers collapsed and he was displaced from his neighborhood, Whitney says, he wandered the streets looking at posters of missing individuals. A poster depicting a young woman with a little boy on her lap caught his eye, and he decided to follow the young woman's family members as they searched for her. When he got to their home on Staten Island, he learned that the family was deeply concerned about what to tell the woman's son, seven-year-old Nicholas Lanza. Whitney gradually introduces the different family members through interviews, beginning with the family's matriarch, Grandma Ethel. Since the attacks three days earlier, Ethel has been periodically fainting. Her daughter, Michele's sister Cindy, has become completely catatonic and refuses treatment of any kind. Another sister, Susan, is obsessed with a rumor floating around that proposes that Nostradamus predicted the attacks in the sixteenth century. Michele's estranged husband Robert is a fundamentalist Christian who refuses to tell Nicholas anything when the boy asks about his mother's whereabouts. The family members work together to shield the boy from any television and keep him out of school so that he won't discuss the attacks there. Soon Whitney begins to interview another family as well. The family, a Muslim clan whose father Shabbir Ahmed was killed in the attacks, is dealing with the tragedy in a different way from the Lanzas: sixteen-year-old Thanbir tries to support his mother and sisters emotionally after they learn the news. The two very different families begin to overlap in other ways when Thanbir befriends Nicholas after agreeing to help Whitney on the shoot.
Details
- NETWORK: HBO
- DATE: May 12, 2002 10:00 PM
- RUNNING TIME: 1:24:58
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: T:70465
- GENRE: Public Affairs/Documentaries
- SUBJECT HEADING: Grief; Grief in children; September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001; She Made It Collection (Sheila Nevins); War on Terrorism, 2001 -
- SERIES RUN: HBO - TV, 2002
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Sheila Nevins … Executive Producer
- Richard Reichgut … Executive Producer
- Lisa Heller … Supervising Producer
- James Ronald Whitney … Producer, Director, Writer
- Mocean Worker … Music by
- James Ronald Whitney … Narrator
- Shabbir Ahmed
- Thanbir Ahmed
- Michele Lanza
- Nicholas Lanza
- Robert Lanza
- Nostradamus