United by Tragedy

May 4, 2007 — -- "Beyond Belief" premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, bringing audiences a raw look into the lives of two Sept. 11 widows trying to cope with their extraordinary losses.

The director and producer of the film, Beth Murphy, told ABC News, "It's not a 9/11 film, that day is clearly a starting point for the story, but really this is a story about two women who, because of the tragedy they experienced, open up their eyes to the world."

On the third anniversary of Sept. 11, Susan Retik and Patti Quigley embarked on a bike ride that started at ground zero and ended in Boston, but it was more than a test of physical strength, it was an emotional journey for two women who knew all too well each other's pain. They both had become widows on Sept. 11, 2001, when the planes their husbands were traveling on were used as weapons and flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Retik and Quigley were also both pregnant at the time and living in the Boston area. They did not know each other before this tragic day, but when they met, they bonded instantly. Retik and Quigley eventually founded an organization called Beyond the 11th to help women struggling with similar losses, only these women were halfway around the world in Afghanistan.

So on the third anniversary of Sept. 11, Retik and Quigley were riding from ground zero to Boston to raise money for relief organizations that aid Afghan widows. This ride was the beginning of Retik and Quigley's journey to make a difference in the lives of women from the very country that the Sept. 11 hijackers had trained in.

"They looked at their own lives and they saw that their children were able to continue going to school, their same schools, they were able to stay in the same homes they were living in and that life, although with this huge hole in it, was able to continue really as it had been." Murphy said. "Whereas in Afghanistan, for a woman when a husband dies, it's the unraveling of the entire life."

Through Beyond the 11th, Retik and Quigley began providing incubators and chickens to widows in Afghanistan, not only to improve the widows' lives immediately, but to empower them with the tools to continue to provide for their families.

Retik and Quigley always intended to travel to Afghanistan to meet the widows they were helping, but it was a hard decision for these two single mothers to make -- their children had already sustained enough loss and a trip to Afghanistan involved many risks.

"It wasn't just a desire to go, it was a need to go to make these connections with the women that they already felt so close to," said Murphy. This desire is what brought them to Kabul. The director said what she witnessed on the ground in Afghanistan was incredible. "It didn't matter the language, it didn't matter Dari or English. It didn't matter the geography, United States, Afghanistan. It didn't matter the economic situation, women of relative wealth, and then the Afghan women who are impoverished," she recalled. "They spoke a different language and the language that they were speaking was the language of womanhood, of motherhood and, for them, of widowhood. And they had incredible conversations with that language that they shared."

Retik and Quigley's journey from their bike ride to Boston to their trip to Afghanistan is a truly remarkable story of two women filled with courage and determination. "Beyond Belief" captures their honesty as they deal with widowhood while also trying to raise their children. As their work with Afghan widows gives them something very profound to focus on, they still have their good days and their bad days.

Some of the most touching moments of the documentary are when it's just simply Retik and Quigley, sitting together, talking through their day-to-day experiences. Director Beth Murphy said, "What you see in Susan and Patti is post-traumatic growth and this moving forward and this ability to do something positive with the pain, the grief they experienced."