Peter Sarsgaard and John Magaro play members of an American television crew covering the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. A real terrorist attack forces them to make difficult decisions.
On September 5, 1972, millions watched a tense international hostage situation live on ABC television as members of a militant Palestinian faction calling itself Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and took the Israeli team hostage. “September 5” follows an American television network’s sports team as it rises to the challenge of covering such a monumental event. For better or worse (rest assured, the film leaves room for debate), their decisions made history as the incident was fueled by media attention and ABC became the first network to televise a terrorist act live.
Even those who weren’t alive at the time probably have a pretty good idea of what happened, thanks in part to Steven Spielberg, whose film “Munich” opens with a reenactment of the same massacre. In the nerve-racking opening minutes of that film — the second-most serious movie of Spielberg’s career, after “Schindler’s List” — the Jewish director points out one of the main reasons Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s focus on the media makes sense here: ABC’s live television coverage was so thorough that both the terrorists and the hostages’ families could follow along in real time and learn from the broadcast what the authorities were doing.
Such details raise important ethical questions about the incident that still resonate today, as countless crises since have garnered similarly tough, on-the-ground journalistic scrutiny—though none have matched ABC’s record 29 Emmys (a mix of sports and news trophies) for its reporting. Those awards celebrate the achievement but gloss over some of the thornier philosophical aspects of the control-room battle that Fehlbaum weaves throughout his economical, 94-minute docudrama. The film’s relevance is also heightened by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, as the fallout from last October 6th attack continues to unfold.
