Sitting in the BNL lounge of the Rome Film Festival across from Franco Fracassi, co-director of the documentary Zero - Investigation 9/11, it is hard to believe that he was largely responsible for what many will see as one of the most controversial documentaries of recent times. Made by a group of Italians using evidence collected from a myriad of experts and eye witnesses, Zero is an investigation into the events of 9/11 and the veracity of the explanations offered by the US government.

Why did you feel compelled to make the film? “I was a journalist for 8 years. If there is something [to find out] I am very curious…What happened on September 11th and what they say happened was really no explanation. They just told us a fairytale. For an Italian this is really clear because in Italy we have had 30 years of terrorism controlled by the Italian government, so we are really used to inside jobs and things like that…This is the difference from the Americans - Americans believe their government, we don’t.”

What is the aim of the documentary? “We don’t want to tell people an alternative truth. We want to give information. I think a good...journalistic investigation, has to give the public all the elements so they can understand…This was our purpose: to try to make people think. Otherwise we can chat about it but we have to start from the same basis, otherwise we are talking about 2 different things. I am talking about a September 11th and you are talking about another September 11th that never happened.”

Do you think approaching the events from a perspective outside the US helped you approach the subject? “We have a different way of thinking; we are less involved than the Americans, we are more free…We don’t have any prejudices about things and we don’t have any fear.”

When asked why there are so many films and documentaries currently being made about the War-on-Terror and 9/11, he cites three main reasons: “First, the war. Now there are two wars - Afghanistan and raq...There is no way that they have fulfilled their goals and some people are starting to get pissed off with the war.”

He also believes that public opinion is changing. “People understand that the British and American governments lied…Now it is official truth that they lied. They are liars. If a liar lies once, they can lie to you as many times as they want…Journalists and general opinion [also] seem to be more free than before. Before it was like McCarthy - nobody could say anything different. Now these people who have controlled everything seem to be more weak. Suddenly the newspapers start to write something, the TV starts to show something, and people start to talk about something different.”

With a crew of more than 115 people and a budget of over US $900,000 this was a documentary on a feature-film scale which took a total of four years to make, two years of which were devoted to raising funding. “I travelled around Europe trying to find the money…when we started talking about September 11th they said no way. So, we decided to create a public company. The movie is a public company and we sold the shares of the movie. We sold a lot of them through eBay. The first film ever!”

Apart from raising capital, what was the most difficult problem you encountered trying to make the film? “Probably to transform all the material that we got, more than 100 hours of interviews and I don’t know how many hours of original footage…into a movie. It’s easy when you have the right amount of footage. It is very difficult when you have 30 times more.”

After premiering the film in Rome and receiving critical interest, the production team is working on raising international awareness of the film. “For now we are concentrating on 2 areas: the US and Arabic countries…The people of these countries are more morally involved. It is more important for them.”
They are currently negotiating with the Cairo Film Festival, and have interest from 40 other countries, although they have not yet found a distributor in the United States.