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The Cell (TV pilot for Showtime) A drama that focuses on an ex-con black Muslim recruited by the F.B.I. to go infiltrate a sleeper Islamic terrorist cell. News Showtime producing TV drama about terror cell LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Showtime cable channel is developing a potential television series about the inner workings and personal lives of a fictional group of Islamic terrorists, a network spokesman said on Tuesday. The program, titled "The Cell," is conceived as the behind-the-scenes story of European and American converts to Islam who are planning terror attacks in the United States, and would be aimed for a debut on Showtime next year, he said. He stressed that "The Cell" was one of numerous pilots in development at the Viacom Inc.-owned network and that only a handful will ever make it onto Showtime's schedule. Israeli-born actor Oded Fehr, who appeared in the movie adventure "The Mummy," has been cast in the lead role as the group's leader and Michael Ealy ("Barbershop") will play a conflicted militant. A number of prime-time shows, including the Fox espionage thriller "24," have featured story lines involving terror plots. Others, including "The Sopranos" and "The Wire" on HBO, and the NBC miniseries "Kingpin," have centered on the lives of gangsters and drug dealers. But "The Cell" would be the first on U.S. television to feature international terrorists as the main protagonists. A two-hour television movie titled "The Hamburg Cell," a fictionalized story about two of the real-life Sept. 11 hijackers, aired on British television, drawing criticism from relatives of some victims of the actual attacks. Showtime's spokesman declined comment on whether the project has generated any controversy at the network. But the network's entertainment president, Robert Greenblatt, told the New York Post that producers would go beyond a superficial depiction of the characters. "We're trying to look into the minds of these (terrorists) and the issues driving them, beyond a black-and-white portrayal," he was quoted as saying. "The leaders of the cell look like nice, normal people you would encounter in everyday life and never know were quietly putting together a power base." He added: "Our only hesitation was sensitivity to the subject matter, which was very scary. Several plot points have already come to pass." According to the Post, one scene cut from the original script depicted a captured serviceman being beheaded on videotape. http://www.odedfehr.de/cell/cell.html

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The Hamburg Cell UGC, Edinburgh Peter Bradshaw Wednesday August 25, 2004 The Guardian Some thrillers grip. This one had me in an SAS chokehold. If there is a more important, more urgent story to be told than this, I can't think of it: the story of the 9/11 hijackers. Until now, no film-maker has tried, perhaps due to a fear that they would be accused of romanticising or mythologising the participants. But British director Antonia Bird and screenwriters Ronan Bennett and Alice Pearman break the taboo with a devastatingly low-key, fictionalised drama-documentary. It recreates the unbearably tense five-year genesis of 9/11, beginning with a handful of expatriate Muslim students in Germany in 1997, drifting into Islamic fundamentalism. It ends as the killers board the planes. This is a world of secret cells, whispered conversations, coded internet chatter, and locations ranging from Hamburg to Washington, Times Square to the Finsbury Park mosque. It is like something by Frederick Forsyth, but in The Day of the Jackal, we could at least relax in the knowledge that General de Gaulle doesn't get killed in the end. Here the opposite is true, and that simple fact is scalp-pricklingly horrifying. Karim Saleh and an actor who styles himself simply "Kamel" play Ziad Jarrah and Mohamed Atta: the terrorists due to crash planes respectively into the White House and the World Trade Centre. Saleh is superb as the agnostic rich-kid Jarrah who, excitable, defensive and mixed-up, gets converted to extreme Islam. Kamel is outstanding as the chillingly committed Atta, at home in a fanatical, pitiless world where the Holocaust is airily dismissed: maybe a Zionist hoax, maybe not, who cares? Euphoric at the prospect of restoring the honour of Islam by slaughtering Jews and Americans, he is pathetically timid and nervously submissive to his parents. This Channel 4-funded feature is due to come out only on television in the UK. It deserves a cinema release. http://film.guardian.co.uk/edinburg...1290548,00.html

I swear I also saw a promo for a 2 hour special made for TV movie much like The Hamburg Cell about 9/11 from eyes of terrorists on HBO, Showtime or some other movie channel but couldn't find any info on it. Maybe it was The Hamburg Cell, -shrugs-