According to its mission statement, “AFI FEST… showcase[es] the best films from across the globe to captivated audiences in Los Angeles. With a diverse and innovative slate of programming, the film festival presents a robust lineup of fiction and nonfiction features and shorts… along with panels and conversations featuring both master filmmakers and new cinematic voices.”
The American Film Institute’s annual film fete took place in October at the TCL Chinese Theatre (that iconic movie palace formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, with stars’ cement footprints in its famed courtyard) and the nearby TCL Chinese 6 Theatre, located beside Hollywood Blvd.’s fabled “Walk of Fame.”
Among AFI FEST’s global panoply of pictures, ranging across the cinematic spectrum from features to documentaries, studio movies to indies, this year AFI’s 38th festival screened at least three top notch films with political themes. Here’s a review of one of them:
The Wide World of Terrorism: Covering the First Terrorist Act on Live TV
On November 22, 1963, an ordinary citizen named Abraham Zapruder just happened to film the shooting of Pres. Kennedy in Dallas with a home movie camera. Nine years later, on September 5, 1972, ABC-TV’s Sports division was covering the Munich Olympics when the Black September Palestinian underground organization seized Israeli athletes, demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners.
The TV crew is faced with the sudden dilemma of how to cover the first terrorist act to unfold on and be broadcast by live television. In a sense, it was as if Abraham was a TV network and the Zapruder Film chronicling JFK’s liquidation took place and was aired on live TV.
In September 5, which has been Academy Award-nominated in the Writing (Original Screenplay) category, Swiss director/co-writer Tim Fehlbaum explores how the ABC Sports crew responded to and dealt with the hostage taking incident in the Olympic Village at Munich and subsequent events.
Compounding the crisis is the fact that although correspondent Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) was on the scene, the news division was across the Atlantic at Manhattan, and covering this hard news (very hard indeed!) story fell into the hands of the ABC Sports studio led by Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the president of ABC Sports.
Arledge actually had to be urgently summoned back to Munich from an Alpine day off from covering the Olympics. Suddenly, the team known for ABC’s Wide World of Sports was thrust into the headlights of an oncoming vehicle that could be called the “Wide World of Terrorism.”
Fehlbaum’s September 5 tells the story of the Munich Olympics strictly from the vantage point of this ABC Sports crew, and how—or whether—they rose to the occasion.
The riveting film raises questions of television techniques and more importantly, journalistic ethics, such as: who is doing the kidnapping of the Israeli Olympiads? Is it the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or Black September?
(Calling on his background of reporting as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Jennings figures out it’s the latter.) What do you call the ski mask-wearing hostage-takers: Are they “commandos”? The broadcasters opt for a term then not very familiar to Americans: “Terrorists.” (Tellingly, during the movie the guerrillas are generally referred to as “Arabs,” not as “Palestinians” per se.)
There are pressing nuts and bolts journalistic questions: What happens if the Black September operatives – who have set a deadline for the release of Palestinian prisoners by Israel, after which they’ll start executing one athlete per hour – shoot an Israeli in front of ABC’s cameras on live TV? Should the network broadcast the execution live? There are arguments back and forth, with Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), who has assumed the directorial role in the control room insisting: “Follow the story wherever it leads” (even if it bleeds).
The coverage competition heats up – not only between ABC and other networks, but between ABC News in Manhattan and ABC Sports in Munich. The latter insists that as they are at the scene of the crime they should remain in charge and refuse to cede control to the News division thousands of miles away.
Although the experienced newsman Jennings is on hand, Jim McKay, host of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, continues as the face and voice of the network, unflappably and ably anchoring the live coverage of the terrorist sneak attack. It’s telling that actual footage of the famed McKay is used, instead of an actor depicting him.
Real news clips of the Black September combatants are also used—however, while Howard Cosell’s voice is presumably heard voice off, the well-known sportscaster does not appear per se as himself or as a character seen onscreen.
Another major journalistic issue regarding the all-important matter of accuracy emerges. What’s more important: Being first or being right?
The hostage crisis is all the more fraught with the troublesome fact that only 27 years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, the world is faced with the sensitive, traumatic possibility of Jews once again being slaughtered in Germany.
The liberal-minded young German woman Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), who starred in the 2023 German movie The Teachers’ Lounge, which was Oscar-nominated for Best International Feature Film, bristles at Third Reich references insisting: “I am not my parents!” is impromptu promoted from being a translator to an on-the-spot reporter for ABC Sports.
This fact-based terrorist tale co-written by Fehlbaum with his Oscar co-nominees Alex David and Munich-born Moritz Binder, is tightly, tautly told.
Viewers interested in journalistic techniques and morals, terrorism, Middle East conflicts (which, alas, obviously still dog us as the Palestinian situation remains unresolved 52 years after the Munich Olympics and counting), history and just great acting (the cast includes British thesp Ben Chaplin as ABC’s Marvin Bader, the voice of journalistic responsibility) are likely to be gripped by this expertly directed and performed real-life 91-minute drama.
I enjoyed September 5 immensely, as well as the ensuing conversation with the stars and director immediately following the AFI screening. However, it did raise some points with me. Told from the perspective of the ABC Sports crew, the Palestinian point of view is completely absent (you know, like Palestinian speakers at the Democratic National Convention) from the movie.
Also, September 5 continues a recurring screen trend in the cinematic rendering (or not) of real-life disasters. Oppenheimer is largely told from the point of view of the Los Alamos scientists; what that thingamajig they were working on at New Mexico, which is the basis for the entire epic, actually did to the Japanese that the A-bombs were dropped on is never explicitly depicted.
The same with Zone of Interest, which is told from the viewpoint of the family of the commandant of Auschwitz in their cushy quarters—never from the vantage point of the miserable inmates on the other side of the walls and barbed wire of the infamous death camp.
Likewise, audiences never eyewitness per se the Munich massacre and the worst violence that befell the Israeli hostages and their Palestinian captors in September 5.
For a motion picture about TV coverage of a true-life tragedy, this is especially odd and raises some serious questions about movie morality.
Are features afraid to show fact-based mass slaughter and mayhem? Does it hit too close to home? Is it bad box office? Inquiring minds want to know, but having said all this I highly recommend Fehlbaum’s thought-provoking, well-made drama. Given Trump’s recent MAGA-vellian lunatic ravings about the U.S. taking over Gaza and expelling Palestinians, call this expansionist insanity “Trump-erialism, September 5 is more timely than ever.
For more info about AFI FEST 2024, see: https://fest.afi.com/.
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About the Author
Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian and critic who also reviews culture, foreign affairs and current events.
Ed can be reached at edrampel@gte.net.
Interesting article. According to a German intelligence file released about 13 years ago, neo-Nazis also helped to prepare the massacre and planned to carry out further terrorist acts in Germany to avenge the police killing of Palestinians in Munich.
The file showed that Abu Daud, the Palestinian behind the massacre, travelled to Germany to plan the attack in July 1972. He was assisted by Willi Pohl, a known German neo-Nazi. It was not clear whether other neo-Nazis were also involved.
The documents cited police in Dortmund who kept Daud under surveillance. They said he met Pohl several times and that the neo-Nazi boasted to his employers about his contacts with a radical wing of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.