Despite early rumblings of Oscars buzz, Tim Fehlbaum’s Munich hostage crisis film September 5 likely hasn’t generated the pull necessary to put it into serious best-picture conversations. But it has managed to make an impact of its own: arousing sharp opinions, debate and at least one call for it to be pulled from theatres.
The movie focuses on the events of Sept. 5, 1972, at the Munich Olympics, when the Palestinian militant organization Black September stormed the Olympic Village, killed two Israeli athletes and took nine more hostage. Ultimately, all the Israeli hostages lost their lives. Nearly one billion people from around the world watched as the crisis unfolded in real time.
September 5 depicts the actions of one ABC broadcasting unit there for the Games and how they pivoted to cover the hostage crisis.
The film debuted to rave reviews in August 2024 at the Venice Film Festival during an uncomfortably prescient moment, with the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel not even a year in the past. The resulting war between Israel and Hamas was in one of its fiercest periods, and the current ceasefire deal, agreed upon just this week, was still months away.
WATCH | The official trailer for September 5:
Fehlbaum wasn’t blind to the timing of the film’s debut, or the way world events could colour interpretations of his movie. But when they were making September 5, he said, political commentary wasn’t even on his radar.
In a conversation with CBC News in November 2024, the same day as a showing and Q&A at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox, he said the movie had already been filmed and edited “when this conflict so tragically escalated again a little bit more than a year ago.”
“Of course I think what’s happening in the world today will have an influence on how people will see that movie,” he said. “But what we try to do is convey a way for the audience to engage with questions about our media environment through that historical lens.”
Most recently, that influence reared its head in the form of an employee-led petition in New York. Workers at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema collected just over 1,000 signatures in an ongoing petition requesting the theatre chain pull the film, which they are currently still showing. The petition cites the film as being complicit in “manufacturing consent” for actions taken against Palestinian people.
Critics divided over film’s approach
Fehlbaum said his film’s focus was squarely on media. Unlike the bevy of other films and series about the hostage crisis, September 5 largely ignores investigating political motivations, hostages and hostage takers.
The movie instead focuses on sports journalists suddenly tasked with covering the hostage crisis from their newsroom, grappling with the then-novel ethical considerations of orchestrating the coverage of live breaking news at an event engineered to have a massive amount of controlled international media coverage.
How much and which footage to show of the gun-brandishing hostage-takers or ill-equipped local police, and which words to use when describing the perpetrators for audiences around the world are all suddenly urgent issues the journalists must address in a very short period of time.
25:59Tim Fehlbaum: A new film dramatizes the live coverage of the 1972 Munich crisis
“It’s very specifically about that moment in time, and from a very specific perspective,” Fehlbaum said in the interview with CBC News, which took place after questions and criticism had begun to rise, but months before workers started the petition to pull the movie from theatres.
The petition’s phrase “manufacturing consent” is a reference to a term coined in 1922 — the idea that media will present a partial depiction of a situation as the whole truth, which eventually becomes public opinion.
It’s a complaint shared by some other reviewers, including Mashable’s Siddhant Adlakha, who called the movie “a blinkered approach that ends up saying little about the events.”
September 5 “erases any context or humanity in relation to the Palestinian gunmen,” wrote Radheyan Simonpillai for the Globe and Mail. “Perhaps that’s to its credit, since emulating the way mainstream news tends to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict then and now is the point.”
But that very criticism is one that other outlets saw as the film’s strength. Reviews from the New York Times, the Washington Post and Variety all went out of their way to congratulate Fehlbaum, who co-wrote the screenplay, for how he navigated depicting one of the most widely-known events of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw’s review read: “The film moves more freely because of its willed unconcern with the historical implications of the Munich hostage massacre,” he wrote.
“Modern audiences may feel the contemporary context makes it naive or obtuse. But it’s a muscular, well-made picture with the tang of cold sweat.”
September 5 is the story of the terrorist hostage-taking and massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, told from the perspective of the TV sports journalists who were covering it live. From its depiction of the ’70s satellite broadcast to the portrayal of the ethical quandaries involved, this movie is just about perfect, says CBC’s Eli Glasner.
Live broadcasts, ethical considerations
The hostage situation, Fehlbaum said, occurred at a particular point in the evolution of news and journalism at large.
The 1972 Munich Olympics were the first Games that could be broadcast live globally via satellite, and the first to occur on German soil since the 1936 Berlin Games. At the time, he said, German officials “wanted to send out a new image to the world — one of the liberal Germany.”
That motivated them to build an “unprecedented media apparatus” to cover the Games, conferring enormous reach and responsibility on journalists who quickly switched “from reporting sports, to reporting on that tragedy.”
And that was the aspect that he found most interesting. The questions that those journalists grappled with — and, for better or worse, answered — reflect how we produce and consume news and crisis reporting today, he said.
Given not only specific conflicts, but the wider status of contemporary media, Fehlbaum says conversations around September 5‘s depiction of real people and real events — which are still of incredible importance today — were bound to come up. But his film, he says, is rooted in a specific time.
“The perspective that we take in September 5 is clearly the media’s perspective. So that was our main focus,” he said. “Of course, politics you can’t separate, in a way, from media. Especially today, we see that more and more — the influence that media has on politics. But we clearly try to show this historical event from the perspective of these broadcasters.”
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