Before, thousands converged on the Toronto International Film Festival in the name of artistry and dreams, commerce and fame, novelty, delight, community, the primal wonder of seeing light dance across a blank screen.

        After, imagination itself turned to dust. When the world suddenly makes no sense, what sense is there in mere entertainment?

        Before, it seemed significant that so many of the works on display explored moral ambiguity. After, confusion over right and wrong took took on a harsh irony. Before, these stories offered fodder for intellectual exercise; after, piteous allegory.

        In Training Day, an American policeman tramples the law to eradicate drug dealers, forcing a dilemma between loyalty and righteousness on his honest younger partner.

        In Focus, an ordinary man passively condones the seething anti-Semitism in his neighbors during World War II even as it begins to destroy his comfortable existence. Only personal violence provokes him into taking a stand.

        In No Man's Land, a Serb and a Bosnian trapped in a trench hold one another hostage while a U.N. peacekeeper futilely tries to untangle the standoff amid political posturing and military paralysis.

        In The Grey Zone, Jewish concentration camp prisoners forced into complicity with the Nazi death machine struggle to redeem their guilt through rebellion.

        In The Bedroom presents a middle-class couple confronting the temptation of cold-blooded revenge after a brutal tragedy.

        There are lessons in these movies to be sure, but now they seem so puny, so unnecessary. On Tuesday morning, fact ruthlessly trumped fantasy. The real rendered the unreal irrelevant.

        An hour after the attacks, a young Japanese woman stood shaking behind the cash register at a tiny coffeehouse, while every few minutes a young man leaned out of a small back room to translate the news he was hearing on the radio.

        “Thank you, good day,” she said, over and over, as customers stepped to the counter one after another. She smiled politely right up until the instant when she burst into helpless tears.

        She was right to cry, while everything going on across the street at the festival seemed wrong. It wasn't long before the movies and press conferences and interviews and parties just stopped.

        A day later, came the uneasy but inevitable announcement that the movies would carry on. No more parties, no more red carpets, festival officials said, but the pictures would run. There was nothing else to do. No one could leave, no one could help where help was needed most.

        With only the burden of triviality to bear, festival visitors lined up between screenings at a site in the main festival complex to donate blood, to join the rest of the world in what swiftly became less an urgent contribution than a gesture, a symbolic sacrifice to the lost.

        Disappointment and disruption were common as air. The interests of filmmakers who had hoped this festival would fulfill their ambitions and actors who hoped to connect with audiences evaporated in agony, shock and sorrow.

        There was no place left to go but into the dark, to watch and to ask ourselves why we were there.

        Those of us who love the movies see in them a way to learn, to understand ourselves and the world, to explore the inexpressible, to share experiences we can never have in life, to escape reality, to forget worry and care.

        But there is no forgetting now, nothing to make this reality go away.

        Now, we have only the question: Will these images, these dancing lights, ever mean anything again, in the shadow of the burning towers?
       
        Contact Margaret A. McGurk by phone: 768-8517; fax: 768-8330; e-mail: mmcgurk@enquirer.com.

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