This documentary is a heart-rending look at the damage caused by the September 2004 attack on School No. 1 in Beslan, in North Ossetia, Russia. For three days, 1 Sept to 3 Sept, Chechnyan rebels took hostage over 1200 school children and parents in their own school. The standoff ended with a massive shoot out with Russian Spetsnaz troops and militia which ended up killing 331 hostages, including over 170 children.
The documentary is a very emotional and powerful look at the impact of the incident on the town and populace of Beslan. It consists of a series of interviews with survivors, relatives of hostages, onlookers, Russian soldiers, and even the primary negotiator between the Russian government and the hostage takers, as well as a lot of primary video sources, taken from cameras of both hostages, onlookers outside the school, and most eerily, the Chechnyan hostage takers themselves. The focus is on the stories of the hostages inside the school, mostly adult hostages who had children among the hostages. The interviews are powerful--the interviewees express a lot of pain and emotion, but in a very tasteful way. There is intentional tugging of heartstrings by the filmmakers and the narration (done by Julia Roberts), when the subject could stand alone. But overall, the documentary succeeds at what it seems to be intended at--memorializing the dead and injured hostages.
My larger problem with the film is that I feel what it intends at isn't sufficient--it's a bit one-sided. While it strongly displays the physical and mental pain and torture that resulted from the hostage situation, it doesn't do a lot to give context to the event. Even for the most informed of Americans, the Beslan hostage crisis we saw only in the news--giving the human story is necessary. But for the unfortunate, uninformed majority of Americans, knowing the context of the situation is more important to developing an understanding of what happened. It mentions only briefly the war in Chechnya, and certainly doesn't examine the atrocities that the Russian army has committed against Chechnyan civilians. Although by no means do I want to justify the actions of the hostage takers, failing to understand in detail what motivated them to go to such extremes is absolutely vital. The filmmakers don't go to many lengths to examine the perpetrators of this crime, even mistaking the fact that many of the hostage takers were not in fact Chechnyan. (Many were radical Muslims of other nationalities.) Toward the end, they air without contradiction the assertion of a survivor that the hostage takers are less than human, animals, beyond reason and emotion. Of course, this avoids the serious question that mass terrorism raises--what is it that allows reasoning and emotional humans to put aside all that in order to kill on such a huge level? Asserting that the hostage takers weren't human doesn't advance our understanding of the Beslan attacks, the war in Chechnya, or terrorism at large.
Lastly, in its haste to show the pain of the Russian victims and demonize the criminals, the film also minimizes the most controversial questions about Beslan, namely, the questions about the Russian government during the siege. The concept is mentioned only in passing, and for the most part the Russian troops are portrayed as competent, self-sacrificing servants of the people. The most controversial moment during the siege was the moment on the third day when an explosion rocked the school, precipitating the actual shoot-out which resulted in most of the casualties. The cause of that explanation is subject to a lot of debate in Russia and internationally--many people believe that a Russian army sharpshooter shot one of the hostage takers who was standing on a trigger to a bomb, designed to explode precisely if the subject is killed. The movie doesn't even ask the question what caused the explosion, even though it was the event which brought the disaster to its final bloody culmination.
Overall this film is a powerful memorialization of the victims of the Beslan school hostage crisis. However, most of the world understands that terrorism is horrible. This documentary may act as an introduction to a discussion of the Beslan crisis, but it is too narrow and one-sided in scope to stand alone in its coverage.
