With what continues in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine makes the event of September 5 a reminder of such awful events have been going on between the two countries for decades. Those event on that fateful day at the 1972 Munich Olympics saw the Palestinian Black September group break into the Olympic village killing two members of the Israeli team taking 9 hostage before negotiating their exit by bus to a military airport where it went catastrophically awry. For the first time a live terrorist incident was covered live by the TV cameras just as ABC television sports whose crew were winding down for another day when they hear the shots.
Told almost entirely from the make shift television gallery of the ABC sports team they were the sole broadcasters of the incident that saw 900 million people globally watch the events unfold. Normally an event that would be covered by their news division now saw the sports team retain ownership of the coverage and the quandaries they would quickly find themselves engaged in. Today the thought of turning on the TV to find sports presenters such as Jimmy Hill, Gary Neville and Andy Gray covering the event is almost as horrifying as finding Prince Andrew wanting to be patron of Barnardos.
Like all TV journalism it was the exclusivity of their scoop that put ABC on top but what it also gave them was a number of dilemmas. Those decisions ranged from whether to call the aggressors terrorists or guerrillas, the battle to keep the satellite to transmit the event and breaking news from unsubstantiated sources to catastrophic effect. But it’s the stomach lurch moment that what they are transmitting live is also being watched by the terrorists who were able to watch what would turn out to be the almost unbelievable utter incompetence and unpreparedness of the German police wholly out of their depth. Untrained officers handling military weapons they had never used and turning down an offer from Israel to provide a special forces team it is almost too incredible and its little wonder that the siege ended in tragedy.
September 5 is a remarkably tense re-enactment of the events with the main cast in the claustrophobia of the cramped TV gallery over seen by Peter Sarsgaard as the executive Roone Arledge, Ben Chaplin as senior producer Marvin Bader but at the films centre is John Magaro as the studio director Geoffrey Mason juggling what to transmit and making decisions out of necessity on the hoof one of which is calamitously wrong.
Added to this is French-Algerian actor Zinedine Soualem as engineer Jacques Lesgards who acts as an Arabic counterpart to the Bader’s Jewish producer. And thrown into the middle of this is German actor Leonie Benesch as the fictional Marianne Gebhardt, ashamed of her country’s past and only too aware of how this incident with the Jewish hostages on German soil looks.
Co-writer and director Tim Fehlbaum gets it all right integrating the actual footage into the drama (that shot of a masked terrorist peaking out from a balcony remains as chilling as ever) , the cast are bang on capturing the feverish and nightmare decisions they have to make at a moment’s notice that will be transmitted worldwide and that the look of the film is that of the quality of picture that was used at the time only adds to the realism. That process of events being shot on 16mm film and having to be rapidly processed for transmission, along with captions and logos being hand generated all add to the accuracy of the era and newsrooms of the day.
Anyone who is has ever worked in a TV newsroom will be only too familiar with the ethics of covering such an event that 24 news channels now demand and frankly feed off.
If there’s one complaint it’s that it doesn’t put the events into any sort of political context but nonetheless at a brief 90 minutes September 5 is a riveting in what would make an ideal triple bill with Spielberg’s ‘Munich’ and better still Kevin MacDonald’s Oscar winning and remarkable documentary, ‘One Day in September’.
related feature : ‘Patriots Day’ – the real life sergeant talks about shooting one of the Boston marathon bombers
related feature : Oscar winning Director Kevin MacDonald talks to us about, ‘The Mauritanian’….
Here’s the September 5 trailer……
