A year after two films premiered at Venice and he won the Volpi Cup for best actor (for Michel Franco's "Memory," in which he played a man with early-onset dementia), Peter Sarsgaard has another thought-provoking film at the festival.

This time around, he says he'd "love to take a little victory lap," but work and family commitments mean he won't be in town. But he'll be there in spirit, with the historical thriller "September 5" — in which he plays famed TV producer Roone Arledge — opening the Horizons Extras section.

From director Tim Fehlbaum, the film centers on the infamous 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, where members of the Israeli team were taken hostage and later murdered. But it tells the tragic and shocking story through the lens of ABC’s news team, suddenly forced to pivot from covering sports to live coverage of a terrorist event. It would become a broadcast watched by an estimated one billion people worldwide, but one that also confronted the news team with — at the time — unique moral and ethical questions about the role of the media in such situations.

For Sarsgaard, who’s coming off a busy period, having just wrapped the Frankenstein epic “The Bride!” (his second feature film is directed by his wife, Maggie Gyllenhaal) and recently starred with brother-in-law Jake Gyllenhaal in the courtroom drama series “Presumed Innocent” on Apple TV+, the events of “September 5” marked the arrival of the kind of live news reporting we see all around us today. But he argues that it’s not something that has helped provide “deeper understanding.”