They smuggle film reels through checkpoints, navigate a sea of buttons and wire up telephones. However, their main job is not espionage. The heroes of Tim Fehlbaum’s new thriller September 5 earn their living as journalists, sound engineers, cameramen and translators. We are with them in the ABC broadcast studio in Munich, September 5, 1972Together they are supposed to broadcast the biggest live sporting event in history. Then shots are fired. The 20th Summer Olympics become the scene of a hostage situation.
September 5 takes place for almost 90 minutes in a television studio
The story of the film, which was shown in a side section of the Venice Festival, recalls Steven Spielberg’s MunichThe thriller masterpiece dealt with the retaliatory measures of the Israeli secret service after September 5th. Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers film The Post is also thematically similar. Next to the newspaper film, however, September 5 seems like a science fiction dystopia.
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John Magaro in September 5
The broadcast studio in Munich is a dark cubbyhole. The light from tube screens and warning lights provides a pale warmth, behind the doors there are corridors in cold blue neon light. It is the domain of Marvin (Ben Chaplin) and his boss Roone (Peter Sarsgaard). Marvin keeps everything running, Roone is the man with the vision behind the live show, which switches masterfully between the recording room and the sports venues every day to keep the audience back home in the USA from switching away.
We spend the next 90 minutes with them and their team (including Leonie Benesch from Das Lehrerzimmer and Past Lives star John Magaro), during which a day in September unfolds, at the end of which eleven Israeli Olympic participants will be dead.
When members of the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September attack the Israelis’ accommodation in the Olympic Village, the ABC people hear the shots. But they hear everything that happens indirectly. Camera images, sound recordings and police radio bring the horror from a few hundred meters as the crow flies into the studio. There, the team that normally reports on sports has to prepare hard news. The idea of competition remains: Who has the first pictures of the terrorists? Who can tell the most emotional story about the victims?
The thriller cleverly builds up a tension that is difficult to bear
Ambition and journalistic idealism are rarely clearly separated among the ABC people. In September 5, they are watched with as much curiosity as Q, who develops the latest gadgets in his MI6 laboratory. They do not produce weapons, but enlarge images, route calls to the live broadcast and create text overlays. The circumstances make them inventive and so they even forge an ID card in order to smuggle fresh film rolls into the restricted area in the Olympic Village.
The screenplay by Moritz Binder and Tim Fehlbaum (Hell) develops a perfidious tension dynamicThe hostage situation becomes a gripping story within the story. Meanwhile, the uncomfortable question arises as to whether the ABC team can win their “competition”. The pressure builds up in a confined space, which is why the film offers almost no relief. This is especially true when the television team gets involved in the story and broadcasts a live police operation, which the perpetrators may also be able to follow on TV.
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September 5 takes place in just a few rooms of a broadcast studio
The cinematic pressure cooker setting has its advantagesIt reduces the characters to the essentials, freeing them from unnecessary backstories. In extreme situations, they show who they are and how far they would go for a story. This strength of September 5 can also be turned into a weakness.
The perspective is deliberately limited, not to say restricted. Once you understand how it works, the film hides neither real surprises nor pitfalls. The connection to our present day – one of the masterpieces in Spielberg’s Munich – is something you have to draw yourself. Which brings us back to one of its strengths. Despite the limitations and the constant tension, September 5 remains a relatively open film at the end. The competition is over, the ball is in the audience’s court to draw their own conclusions. One of them is: if you haven’t already done so, you have to remember Tim Fehlbaum’s name.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 5. The film will be released in German cinemas on November 7.