About six months after the September 11 attacks, I interviewed people and asked whether they were proud to be an American.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was sitting in the basement of The Art Institute of California–San Francisco, waiting for my Introduction to Multimedia class to begin. When the instructor arrived, he seemed surprised to see students still on campus. News was breaking: two airplanes had struck the World Trade Center. Our class sat in stunned silence, trying to make sense of what was happening. Some students shared that a flight bound for the Bay Area had been hijacked, and its passengers had fought back. We were warned that the BART system might shut down and that the Golden Gate Bridge could be a potential target. Soon after, campus officials urged us to leave immediately.

That day, my desire to understand the world more deeply—and to document it—was born. The images from that morning still live in my memory: people leaping from burning buildings, towers crumbling to dust, a city covered in smoke and fear. I needed to know why this had happened.

But more than that, I needed to hear how others were making sense of it, and I felt a growing responsibility to preserve those voices.

A few months later, I enrolled in a cinematography course and used my final project as an opportunity to explore public sentiment through video storytelling. I created a short documentary titled The People, interviewing a wide range of individuals around San Francisco—professors, children on school field trips, unhoused residents in the Tenderloin, and fellow students. The people interviewed are anonymous, have varied socio-economic  backgrounds and include wide range of age groups. I asked each of them the same question: “Are you proud to be an American?” Years later, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I visited the memorial site at Ground Zero in New York City and asked the same question again.