HOST:
There you have it. That is Nicholas that lost his mom in the 9/11 attack. The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center left many families as you know without their loved ones. A new documentary brings that story to life. It documents the family struggle to tell a seven year-old that his mommy won't be coming home, isn't just lost in Manhattan, she was killed. With us is James Ronald Whitney, the director of 'Telling Nicholas' and Thanbir Ahmed, a young man who appears in the film, and you also lost your dad in the World Trade Center.

HOST:
Welcome both of you.

WHITNEY & AHMED:
Thank you.

HOST:
I watched last night so on Mother's day, on HBO everyone will see this. I had the privilege of seeing it last night, and you're a documentation who lives right next to the World Trade Center. You see this happening, you whip out your camera and start taping. Did you have any idea where this was going when you were first started rolling?

WHITNEY:
No, I first looked at the hole that was in Tower One, and had a still camera and started photographing that and then watched the second plane fly into Tower Two and it was at that point that I set up the cameras just to, sort of chronicle what was going on. I didn't even realize that we were under terrorist attack at that point, as ridiculous as it sounds, I thought there was simply an air traffic control problem or something malfunctioning.

HOST:
Hey we were on the air. We thought the same thing.

WHITNEY:
Yep. And when the Pentagon was hit, that's when I realized that this was terrorist activity obviously, and I just continued shooting-and the movie chronicles ten days , beginning with the day of the attack.

HOST:
But you personalized it. You went over and you looked at all the missing people on the air. On the board rather, of everyone that was so hopeful that there people, (that thought) their relatives were in hospitals and as we know it didn't happen. You saw Nicholas, and you saw this man.

WHITNEY:
I'd seen a number of flyers with a father and a child, but the one that caught my eye showed a picture of this little boy, Nicholas, with his mother, and since I've worked with a lot of children's advocacy groups I made a call to Nicholas' family. I was just going to give then the names of some of these assistance organizations like www.childtrauma.org, Child help USA--some of the help-lines that are set up to assist children in a crisis.

HOST:
Right.

WHITNEY:
And after speaking to Nicholas's aunt...

HOST:
And that's Nicholas and his mother.

(showing a picture of the two on-screen)

WHITNEY:
and his mother's right there, yeah. And after speaking with Michele's sister, Nicholas's aunt, the family invited me over, because the father was having such a difficult time telling his son that his mother may not be coming home.

HOST:
Hoping that maybe in three or four days that she'd turn up he wouldn't have to explain again that she's back.

WHITNEY:
Sure.

HOST:
And who wants to do that? And that scene is one the, as emotional as you'll ever find in the history of television. You have to monitor it as a producer, in the neighbor's yard, you know, you're over there, and you have to listen to it, who knows what's going on, that mom isn't missing, that she's past away. Now Thanbir, you found out right away that your father passed away.

AHMED:
Yeah, right away in school someone at school told me...

HOST:
He was in the Windows of the World.

AHMED:
that he was in the Windows of the World, on the 107th floor and what happened was someone had told me that someone had crashed on the top of the towers. And I was like 'What?' And on the way home I was told that the building had collapsed and then I realized that I had just inferred that my dad was dead because previously, in 93, it took him five hours for him to get out, alone. So I thought there was no way he could get out, so

HOST:
How do you link up with Nicholas in this, because you're both going threw the same thing but drastically different ages.

AHMED:
Right, right. We're from two different worlds totally. And what happened was when Ron came over to my house, he invited me to go over on some of the shoots at Nicholas's house. There I met Nicholas and his family and at that point Nicholas hadn't been told yet that his mother had passed away and at first it was awkward meeting his grandmother and his grandfather who weren't that appealing to Muslims. And from that point of I became

HOST:
Not appealing, they have hatred! Obviously like many of the victims two-thousand plus that lost their lives there. They have hatred, and they see a guy from Bangladesh.

AHMED:
Right, and eventually we became great friends. I went to his mom's memorial and I took him trick or treating, and I spent Christmas with them. So it was great afterwards

HOST:
Did you think to yourself 'I shouldn't be here' at any point? This is so painfully personal, this is the inner working of a family, maybe I don't belong here.

WHITNEY:
No. The reason I do documentaries is that I find reality, raw reality to be an incredibly powerful fact of life. And that's why HBO acquired this project--nobody else could do have broadcast it. Home Box Office allowed the unimaginable to be imagined through the footage that you were just showing. The movie is uncencored. So when Nicholas is told that his mom is dead, it's not soft-peddled. I felt that it was important to chronicle this conversation, because there was no model for what would transpire in a situation like this: 'What was the father going to go through?' 'What was the son going to go through?'

HOST:
And the sister's almost catatonic

WHITNEY:
Actually she was catatonic. You see her just rocking, back and forth.

HOST:
Who refuses to say a word, and she has kids, and then the mom, the grandmother has to really start raising these kids again. Her life has been turned on it's ear.

WHITNEY:
Sure. That same mom, Michele's mother, was talking in detail about how she wanted Muslims tortured. Nicholas' grandmother wanted heir finger nails ripped off, their eyes ripped out, their hair plucked out one strand at a time--and she says 'men, women and children, because there's going to be another generation of terrorists just like them if we don't take care of this one.' But after getting to know Thanbir, realizing that his father is also dead, she understood that there was something her grandson, Nicholas, had in common with this particular Muslim-16-year-old Thanbir. And ultimately, the bond between these two boys became so strong that in the end as Thanbir just mentioned, he spent holidays at Nicholas' grandparent's house..

HOST:
(looking over to Ahmed) And finally you doing something so proactive, you were walking around with people saying 'win twenty dollars, point out Afghanistan, tell us where everything is.' That's how you're dealing with your unspeakable sorrow?

AHMED:
Right, I'm also dealing with, after helping Nicholas deal with the tragedy I came up with an idea for a day to recognize all the kids who lost a parent, National Orphan's Day. And since technically an orphan is a child without one or no parents, and now it's kid's day and hoping to put an event in Central Park for all the kids who lost parents. As well as incredible kids.

HOST:
Right. You're an incredible guy, your dad's so proud of you and he has do be so proud of you, and you should be really proud of yourself.

AHMED:
Thank You.

HOST:
Alright. Great. Very important, and I think it's so important as the administration and the rest of the country goes 'do you realize what happened on 9/11?' Naturally people forget, watch this documentary and suddenly you realize how many people were effected. Very important documentary, you did a great job. I wouldn't have liked to look threw the raw footage of this to edit it down. Telling Nicholas is the name of it if you want to see it and I'm sure you do 10:00 on HBO. Thanbir and James Ronald Whitney, thanks so much for your time.

WHITNEY & AHMED:
Thank You.