documentary relies on eyewitnesses victims who survived firefighters police officers and government officials including the president at the time franois hollande they obtained contemporary footage from a television crew traveling with some of the firefighters who responded and from the offices of the emergency dispatchersthe result is a remarkable threepart account that opens with the kind of postcard images of sunrise over paris that are beloved by morning news shows and moves through the day and night intersplicing interviews with 42 people who were thereimagecreditbertrand guayagence francepresse getty imagesthe main point is not to forget either the good or the bad or to become too emotionally distant from what happened gdon naudet saidin new york firefighters family friends the people who survived they are extraordinary their basic response was positive in the sense that they did not want to let what happened to them destroy them he said it was the same spirit in paristhe naudet brothers were in manhattan on sept 11 2001 so their cameras captured the disaster as it unfoldedin 911 you were there because we were there said jules naudet they did not witness the paris attacks but wanted the same immediacy so they asked those they interviewed to speak in the first person and in the present tensehere we wanted to recreate the same thing but without the images with only being in the peoples heads jules naudet saidthe naudet brothers decided to show not only the horror and destruction of terrorism but also the resilience they discovered in those who are touched by terrorismnone of the survivors talk about hatred revenge and killing gdon naudet said you have a choice you go the dark way or you go the way with light