Directed by Tim Fehlbaum | Written by Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David | 95min | ▲▲▲▲ 1/2

Oh, the regret when your faithful film reviewer stumbles upon a feature having just been released, though it’s officially from the previous year, making it too late to include on your list of the Top 10 Films of 2024. September 5 knocked me flat. It’s a based-on-real-life drama about the ABC Sports crew who found themselves in the position of reporting on the hostage-taking by Palestinian militant group Black September of Israeli athletes taking place over a day at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

If you’re a fan of Steven Spielberg you’ll remember how he imagined the events of that day in his fantastic 2005 thriller, Munich — for my money still his best work this century — but this take isn’t about the athletes as much as it is about the coverage. The film recreates that day through the eyes of sportscasters and the people tasked with bringing that news to American audiences and, paced like an action thriller, shows how this they pushed the boundaries of their comfort and experience, even of the archaic technology they used, in order to capture what happened that day.

We spend most of our day in the ABC studios in Munich, located just outside the athletes’ village. Our way in is John Magaro (Past Lives) as Geoffrey Mason, ABC sports producer and low man on the totem pole in this very hierarchical, male-dominated environment. Just above him is operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin, doing a good job hiding his pommy accent), with the chilly Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) in charge. They all  have individual takes on how to approach these events, and their meetings to discuss approaches in the hallway outside the studio is the heart of the film.

Also key in this scenario is Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch, The Teachers’ Lounge) as one of the few Germans in the studio, a technician press-ganged into being a translator when they need it and suffering under the abysmal chauvinism of the day.

Anyone who works in news-gathering will recognize this sweaty world — even as the production design is so believably early-’70s and the grain of the film believably 16mm, with the tech many generations old. The film offers a lot of detail on work-arounds: How quickly can you edit tape on these decks? Is it possible to wheel one of the cameras that looks like a Dalek out of the studio to point directly at the apartment where the athletes are being held? What goes into negotiating with the others for access to the single satellite that every American network has to use? And how much do they dare show to audiences watching at home? Would they broadcast the murder of an athlete as they would the same athlete crossing the finish line of a 100 metre race? 

September 5 also gets into how the world changed when these diligent journalists were suddenly witness to these events, but with a lighter touch. The film seamlessly mixes archival footage with the drama it stages as the events of the day overtake any thought of athletics. They recognize how the German police were utterly unprepared, and what happened later when helicopters flew the Israeli captives to a military airport.

The film offers the origin of the media terminology “terrorist,” how it became part of the common parlance, and asks the question: Were the journalists culpable in what happened? Was their need to cover events moment to moment — something we expect now with every event and the ubiquity of the 24-hour news channels — allowing the hostage-takers, who had access to televisions in the apartments, a better understanding of what was going on outside?

I like that the film leaves that as a question, avoiding the definitive suggestion of these hardworking broadcasters being unwitting accomplices in the tragedy, but the possibility of unintentional collusion yet lingering. The ethics of the media is what’s at the forefront here, not necessarily the political ramifications of what happened on the day, but it also seems to be saying it’s impossible now, 53 years later, to separate them.

The responsibility of journalists not only to get the story right but not cause additional harm has only become heavier in the years since September 1972 — and some organizations have completely shirked it, especially in American cable television — but this film serves as a terrific reminder of said responsibility, as well as a historical document of the decisions made on that day by the storytellers that continue to resonate.