Most great journalism films, it must be said, are about print media. Television newsrooms, when depicted on the big screen, are where telegenic people fall in love, realise their potential or sue their boss for sexual harassment.
Yes, there was the prescient Network, the insightful but cute Broadcast News – and its 21st-century television offspring The Newsroom – plus the tobacco industry whistleblower The Insider. Otherwise, it seems celluloid goes better with ink – Spotlight, All the President’s Men, She Said, um, The French Dispatch.
September 5 provides television news with a journalism procedural that feels up there with the best true-story newsprint dramas. It’s a taut 85 minutes about the attack by the Palestinian Black September Organisation on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in 1972. It’s told from the perspective of the sports broadcasters of American network ABC, whose cramped production facility was near enough to the athletes’ village ‒ where the Israeli team members were taken hostage ‒ they could wheel a studio camera outside to film it live.
They did that while battling the ABC news division wanting to take the story over from the US, as well as rival networks for limited satellite time. This was the first terrorist act to be covered on live television so they had to make up the rules as they went along: One of the team asks: “Can we show someone being shot on live television?”
What happened inside the village, why it happened and what happened after it was all over isn’t in the frame here. And it has been covered before in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 Mossad revenge thriller Munich, which followed the gripping 1999 documentary One Day in September. In this, director Kevin Macdonald used original ABC footage and audio to help give it the immediacy of an unfolding event.
What it took to get those pictures in the first place – and tell the world what they were seeing in real time – might seem like examining a historic event through a narrow American viewfinder.
It’s actually directed and co-written by Swiss-German film-maker Tim Fehlbaum in a departure from his previous post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies. His film, which was shot before the October 7 Hamas attack and the Israeli response, offers plenty of reminders that the 1972 games were meant to put a spotlight on a new, open, optimistic West Germany 27 years after the end of World War II and 36 since a very different Olympics in Berlin.
That Jewish lives were at stake in Germany but its military was constitutionally forbidden to be called in – leaving any rescue attempt to untrained police – is one of many telling points in Fehlbaum’s screenplay. That script can be a little exposition-heavy in the scene-setting at the beginning. Mostly though, September 5 is tightly wound and exciting, despite being largely about a room full of people watching screens, picking up phones and walking and talking in dark corridors.
There’s some deft editing of the actual footage of ABC anchor Jim McKay, and the phoned-in reports of reporter Peter Jennings into the behind-the-scenes control room drama. Jennings is also played by Benjamin Walker in a few scenes. But the film’s storytelling drive is from the pinballing ensemble of Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin and John Magaro playing the ABC sports producers and studio directors, and Leonie Benesch playing a fictionalised German studio assistant who is promoted to translator and field reporter.
Seeing that day unfold through their characters’ eyes and through their triumphs and mistakes makes September 5 an astute examination of a moment in broadcast journalism and a riveting one.
Rating out of five: ★★★★
September 5, directed by Tim Fehlbaum, is in cinemas now.
