The story of the 1972 massacre at the Olympic Games in Munich is told through the eyes of the sports reporters that broadcast it to America in September 5, which opens in Prague cinemas this weekend after premiering at the Venice Film Festival last fall. This one seemed to slip under the radar despite its Oscar-friendly subject matter and a thoroughly gripping presentation, scoring only a single Academy Award nomination for Original Screenplay, but is well worth catching up with for both audiences familiar with the central event and those coming in unaware.
Of course, many viewers will be familiar with the events September 5 dramatizes: the Munich massacre was broadcast live to an estimated 900 million people, and retold in films like the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September and Steven Spielberg‘s Munich. At the 1972 Summer Olympics, eight members of the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September stormed the Olympic Village in Munich, resulting in a hostage crisis that left eleven Israeli athletes and officials dead.
Directed by Tim Fehlbaum from his screenplay co-written with Moritz Binder and Alex David, September 5 is more interested in how the event was shown to the world; namely, through the lens of a veteran sports broadcast team that was unprepared to cover an event of such magnitude—but, as the only American news team on the scene, fought to broadcast scenes of terrorists and hostages live from Munich.
September 5 opens in the ABC Sports newsroom in Munich as head of operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) bristles at the coverage tactics of president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard). When American (and Jewish) swimmer Mark Spitz wins gold, Arledge cuts to the dejected reaction of his West German competitor and preps questions about the Holocaust, ramping up the emotional factor for TV audiences.
It’s a theme that will recur throughout September 5 the following day, as control room head Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) takes over studio operations and reports of gunfire in the Olympic Village start to trickle in. The station is still covering women’s volleyball as Mason utilizes all his resources—including technician Jacques Lesgards (Zinedine Soualem) and translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), the only member of his team who speaks German—to find out what’s going on… and get a crew on site to cover it.
All hands are soon on deck, and the ABC Sports team is broadcasting live from across the street, with reporter Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) narrating scenes of terrorists strolling on the balcony and German police preparing to intervene. Notably, the crew spots their own coverage being shown on TV inside the Olympic Village, indicating that the terrorists are also monitoring police response live.
The vast majority of September 5 unfolds inside the control room, and it’s the commitment of these characters to cover the rapidly-unfolding events that makes the film utterly compelling. Their discipline is reflected by director Fehlbaum, who covers the story in ruggedly procedural fashion, never dipping into sentimentality despite the tragic events the movie depicts.
That kind of focus doesn’t allow for much character growth, but Magaro, following up his memorable turn in Past Lives, is especially compelling as the novice manager who wants to get the story right, despite the pressure to report on it live. Chaplin, too, is a standout as the station head who defies numerous outside requests to alter his coverage… to sometimes controversial effect.
Despite being largely set in the single studio production facility, September 5 was filmed on location in Munich, which gives the film an additional sense of authenticity. Cinematography by Markus Förderer is dark and trenchant, evoking the paranoia thrillers (The Parallax View, The Conversation) of the era—even though the events presented here are all too real.
September 5 shares some similarities with last year’s Czech submission to the Academy Awards, Waves, which depicted how members of Czechoslovak Radio broadcast the 1968 Warsaw Pact Invasion to the Czech public. Unlike that film, where the radio journalists heroically defied Soviet orders and stayed on the air, the protagonists of September 5 are just doing their job. But it’s that dogged professionalism, absent of personal motivation, that makes their story so interesting.
