September 5 - Review 

Rating: 5 out of 5

THE story of the 1972 Munich Olympic terrorist incident in which 11 Israeli athlete hostages were eventually killed along with five members of the Black September organisation and one German police officer has already been told in Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day In September, as well as Steve Spielberg’s aftermath movie Munich.

It is now revisited by Swiss director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum, offering the story from the perspective of the journalists covering it: ABC TV’s sports division, who found themselves with exclusive access to the events from their cramped, claustrophobic offices.

The film’s timing couldn’t be more relevant given the current Israeli-Palestinian situation, and audiences will certainly draw parallels while being offered further insight into some of the complex history surrounding the ongoing situation.

But while procedural in its approach, Fehlbaum’s film also examines wider issues, such as journalistic integrity and how it has evolved in the modern era, as well as sexism in the workplace.

It’s a tense, taut film that unfolds across a tight 95 minutes, while simultaneously engaging on a satisfying intellectual level; never spoon-feeding the audience but giving them plenty to think about.

Included among a uniformly excellent cast are Peter Sarsgaard, as the executive Roone Arledge, charged with overseeing the ensuing terror and making the big judgement calls in terms of content and air time, as well as John Magaro, as the harassed young studio director Geoffrey Mason, receiving his first big break and being forced to improvise and invent new live-transmission techniques amid the escalating chaos.

German actress Leonie Benesch also stands out as the fictionalised character, Marianne Gebhardt - a German apologist who still feels guilt for her country’s treatment of the Jews during World War II, and who is very much viewed as the woman in the room (“make me a coffee”), until her value is truly realised by virtue of her ability to translate what is being said between the terrorists and the hostage negotiators.

And French-Algerian actor Zinedine Soualem plays the engineer Jacques Lesgards, whose Arabic ancestry offers a nice counterpoint to the Jewish presence in the newsroom. Indeed, various comments amplify the tensions that already exist between various nations, which are then exacerbated by the escalating scenario.

It’s a measure of the film’s ability to maintain impartiality that it succeeds in landing so many great points and perspectives without seemingly taking a side: indeed, rather like the news team it is focused upon, the film exists to watch and observe… enabling viewers to do the rest.

As such, debates surrounding what should or shouldn’t be shown in a live context are highly intriguing and offer valuable insight into the moral and ethical decisions that sometimes have to be made in a matter of minutes; while also showing how far standards have perhaps fallen in recent times.

A particularly telling moment surrounding the veracity of a report on the welfare of the hostages can easily be viewed against the context of truth in the current era, when misinformation is rife. Here, it matters whether what is being broadcast is absolutely true, with mistakes being viewed very seriously.

The fact that the Munich massacre became the first terror incident to be broadcast live also sounds amazing given the current proliferation of real-time reporting of all too frequent terror incidents, while the complex politics of both the Israeli-Palestine conflict and the inadequacy of the global response to the world-wide reach of terror are also placed into sharp focus.

There’s so much to unpack, which adds to both the challenge and exhilaration of watching the film unfold.

It’s muscular when it needs to be, sensitive where it should be, and always articulate in its dissection of both the real-time events it is portraying and the subsequent implications it carried.

It is a five-star experience.

Certificate: 15

Running time: 95mins