Awards Season: September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum, 2024)

September 5 is a tense and thrilling docudrama about the ABC sports broadcasting team that covered the hostage crisis at 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.

On that particular day a group of Israeli athletes and coaches was taken hostage by members of a terrorist group called Black September, who demanded the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum, who wrote the Oscar nominated screenplay together with Moritz Binder and Alex David, doesn’t take sides or offer political views on the past or present.

Instead, Fehlbaum focuses on the journalists and technicians doing the best they could to cover the story that was unrolling before their very eyes.

The sports broadcasting team of America’s ABC News was located so closely to the hotel where the hostages were held that they were the only ones with live footage of the dramatic situation, which grew more desperate by the hour, before eventually culminating in a shootout at the local airport.

September 5, a taut 95 minute movie - that premiered in Venice last year and is currently rolled out around the world - offers a masterclass in controlled story telling.

It’s a nail biter - even if you’re old enough like me to remember (most of) the actual events - with both a terrific ensemble cast and a fair number of individual performances that deserve to be highlighted.

There is Peter Saarsgard as the ABC executive trying to keep his team on the air as long as possible; he has to fight his higher-ups who want the News team to take over from the Sports team, while also battling CBS executives who want their time slots back.

There is also Ben Chaplin as the Head of Production, who becomes the moral beacon of the story, asking himself and his team questions like: do we really want to be live if and when a hostage is shot dead so that the rest of the world including his parents will see it?

Then there is John Magaro, a relatively inexperienced producer and director, who is continually put on the spot and has to make difficult decisions all through the day based on a mixture of intelligence and instinct.

Finally, there is German actress Leonie Benesch (The Teacher’s Lounge), who starts out as a lowly translator, but quickly becomes an integral part of the team, thanks in no small matter to the fact that she is the only one who speaks fluent German and can also listen to the German police radio.

Shot in dazzling cinema verite style by cinematographer Markus Förderer, and expertly edited by Hansjörg Weißbrich, the movie cleverly mixes seventies styled, authentic looking material with actual archive material, from the likes of presenter Jim McKay who was the anchor of the now historic broadcast.

And yeah, that iconic shot of the masked terrorist looking out over the hotel balcony is also there, as a chilling reminder of the powerful images the ABC Sports Team sent out into the world.

What happened in 1972 in Munich was the first major hostage situation broadcasted live on television. It was apparently watched by 900 million viewers worldwide. It was the shape of things to come and, for better or worse, testament to the phenomenal power of visual media.

I give it four stars!

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