peter sarsgaard

September 5 is almost like watching a documentary. It is so believably real, and it manages to build the tension and keep it despite the audience knowing or having the opportunity to know what happens. This is a film about a tragic event, but it’s not political. It’s more about breaking news and how it’s disseminated to the public. It’s how split second, ethical choices are weighed and made from moral and competitive points of view. Electronic media has changed exponentially in the last 40 years, but the broadcasters haven’t. September 5 allows us to be fly’s on the wall of the past.

On September 5,1972, Palestinian terrorists, part of a group known as Black September, infiltrated the Olympic Village in Munich, killing two Israeli athletes and taking nine others hostage. Writer/director Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 is a tense journalism thriller, chronicling how news of that atrocity reached the rest of the world. Since ABC Sports was broadcasting the Olympic Games, utilizing their link to the newly launched space satellite, its bleary-eyed crew were on-site and among the first to hear gunfire. As they scrambled to get into position to ‘cover’ this major story, logistics became their primary concern.

In September 5 Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum recreates the historical trauma of the 1972 Munich Olympics when eight members of the Black September Palestinian group scaled a fence, shot two men, and then took eleven Israeli athletes and coaches hostage. No one anticipated such an event, nor had anything like this ever happened previously. Shocked by gunshots, desperately trying to grasp what had just occurred, workers in the ABC Sports control room scrambled to follow events. But first, as the crisis came into focus, Roone Arledge, president and executive producer of ABC Sports, had to insist that ABC news would not take over the coverage, an act of courage in and of itself.

September 5 is an intensely gripping dramatization of ABC Sports News’ moment-to-moment live, on air coverage of the shocking Palestinian terrorist massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Berlin in 1972. ABC’s coverage was a first. Seen by millions of viewers around the world, it was the first such live on the scene reportage of an international breaking news story, a precedent-setting achievement in news gathering. Although the horrendous outcome of the attack is widely known, the film is such an authentic and detailed account of what happened, as seen from the news team’s point of view, that it feels like an observational documentary, one that puts you inside ABC’s broadcast control room with the news team as they synthesize updates from reporters, German and Olympic authorities and other sources, and manage their technical resources to get accurate information to millions of viewers galvanized to their TV sets worldwide.