## The Documentary and the Long Reckoning
In 2021, Buscemi spoke at length about September 11 in a first-person account published in TIME magazine, as told to journalist Karl Vick. The account appeared in the twentieth anniversary coverage of the attacks and gave him a public forum for something he had addressed in various interviews over the years: what he had actually done, what it had felt like, and what the long aftermath had been.
The essay is careful and honest. He does not claim to have rescued survivors. He does not describe dramatic personal encounters or specific individual moments of heroism. He describes the work itself — the bucket brigade, the debris, the body bags — and the emotional texture of being in a place of mass death while doing something physical. He describes the feeling of connection he had sought and found. He describes the difficulty of stopping.
The same year, he was listed as executive producer of Dust: The Lingering Legacy of 9/11, a sixty-five-minute documentary directed by Bridget Gormley that addressed the long-term health consequences of Ground Zero dust exposure. The film was part of a body of work — documentaries, journalistic investigations, advocacy campaigns — that has spent two decades documenting what the early official reassurances about Ground Zero air quality got catastrophically wrong. Buscemi’s involvement as executive producer was consistent with the pattern of his sustained engagement: using whatever leverage his name and professional position provided to make visible the ongoing consequences of the attacks for the people who had worked the site.