In Michael Moore's documentary about the attacks on the US in 2001 (Fahrenheit 9/11, 2004) the screen suddenly cuts to black, leaving its disoriented audience with the threatening sounds of physical impact at the site of the Twin Towers. Another wrenching edit introduces hand-held footage of bystanders staring upwards in disbelief. Instead of reuniting images and sound in this moment, Moore makes a crucial aesthetic decision and one that serves as the catalyst for this chapter: he aligns one of the most challenging events of the new millennium, in its surreal horror, with the ethereal sound world of Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977). From an empirical standpoint, Cantus plays an incongruous and short-lived role in the film; it has little in common with Jeff Gibbs's original score or the pop and rock songs that Moore later stated were responsible for sustaining him and the crew through the filming process. Yet Pärt's music fulfills a potent role in its narrative and critical function. Like so many filmmakers since the early 1990s who have utilized Pärt's precomposed music – especially the tintinnabuli style – Moore capitalizes on its effectiveness to express a singular, sustained idea within a narrative process.

The story of Pärt's inadvertent involvement with Fahrenheit 9/11 is not only a lesson in the potency (some would say coerciveness) of his music in the hands of one filmmaker. It is also a decisive moment in the story of Pärt’s reception, a story that has been shaped increasingly by film and new media. In a strange twist of fate, Moore’s audience for Fahrenheit was the largest ever in American documentary film. Its release was a highly publicized event because the Walt Disney Company had retracted its initial support and later forbidden its subsidiary Miramax to distribute the film, citing its partisan nature. Images of the scene with Pärt’s music had saturated the media in graphic detail.