September 5, 1972, has gone down in history as an infamous date in the history of the Olympic Games. Several documentaries and fiction films have already been made about this event and its aftermath, including a film directed by Spielberg. ‘September 5‘, the film made in 2024 by Swiss-born director Tim Fehlbaum, describes the history of this day from the perspective of the television team of the American network ABC. For the first time in the history of television, a satellite was used to bring the Olympics to American viewers on their small screens. The technical capabilities of live transmissions and the location of the studio in the close neighborhood of the Olympic village made of the ABC journalists the main source of information for the entire planet. Their broadcasts were watched live by 900 million people. A new genre of television was born then – live news, political events as entertainment for the masses. For better or worse.
The film tells with documentary precision, in chronological order, the story of what happened that day. The team of journalists sent by ABC was composed almost exclusively of sports journalists plus the technicians. Given that they were already on the scene, they decided to take the initiative and broadcast live and exclusively. On this occasion, they achieved a premiere in the history of journalism, which demonstrated the power of the communication medium but also highlighted the problems and risks that so many news journalists would face in the coming decades. Where does the public’s right to be informed stop when the news can also reach the criminals and help them by revealing the actions or plans of law enforcement? Should distribution be limited when journalists are confronted with terrorists whose interest and intention is to gain global publicity for their causes? How should the criminals be called? The dilemma of using the term ‘terrorists’ has existed since then and to this day it is loaded with political significance. On September 5, 1972 and many times since then, journalistic teams, including television ones, became not only spectators and intermediaries in the transmission of information, but also actors in the political dramas of the planet. ‘September 5‘ follows what happened that day with the narrative power of the best docu-dramas.
The entire cast is well selected and acts excellently. Two characters stand out from the diverse gallery present on the screen: Marianne Gebhardt, the German translator played by Leonie Benesch, a young German woman who still feels responsibility for the deeds committed by her parents’ generation (the story takes place only 27 years after the end of World War II) and the Jewish journalist Marvin Bader, played by Ben Chaplin, who comes from a family in which many of the relatives had perished in the Holocaust. For authenticity, the cinematography uses artificial aging processing of the image, reducing the quality to that of visual recordings on magnetic tapes from that period. Retro technology enthusiasts will enjoy the technical details of the television studios of the period, from the huge reels and machines with magnetic tapes to the heavy cameras weighing tens of kilograms and the superimposition of text on the image with cut and pasted letters. Sharply filmed and fluently narrated, ‘September 5‘ is also an excellent action thriller, but above all it catches an essential moment in the history of journalism and news television, a moment whose implications we experience to this day.