The Olympics are about brotherhood, human achievement, and celebrating the will of the human spirit. Unfortunately, it is also the perfect occasion to perpetrate notorious acts of terrorism. With basically every country in the world represented there, and the best athletes in the world gathered in one place, there is no moment when more people will be looking at a single point at a given time than during the Olympics. And everyone knows that.
A Questionable Massacre
This became evident during the Munich massacre, during the 1982 Olympic Games. The terrorist group Black September, a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, kidnapped several Israeli athletes demanding the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, as well as the founders of the Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, imprisoned in West Germany.
The rescue attempt was an absolute disaster. With eleven athletes and coaches dead, a fallen police officer, and five of the eight members of Black September killed, the police operation was an absolute disaster. And the reprisals from the state of Israel, in their own way, were not much better, organizing Operation Spring of Youth and Operation God’s Wrath, where hundreds of Palestinians died.
This context is important because it arrives on streaming September 5. A film that narrates these events, choosing a very particular point of view: that of the ABC Sports news team that decided to cover the kidnapping and the resulting police operation minute by minute.
Using many archival images from ABC itself, the film contemplates the limits of journalistic information. And it does so with actors in a state of grace. Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, and Leonie Benesch are some of those involved in the film, giving a more than evident weight to a movie very aware of the gravity of the events. And they are walking in the footsteps of a previous film: Munich, by Steven Spielberg, released in 2005.
The difference between both films is that, while Spielberg was more interested in the political side of it, Tim Fehlbaum, director of September 5, is more interested in the journalistic aspect. Without judging or wanting to weigh in on the motivations of the terrorists or the state of Israel, it invites us to think about what the role of journalism should be in these dramatic moments of history.
The Perspective of Journalism
Considering how the situation in the Gaza Strip has worsened and the relations between Palestine and Israel, the film is not only more relevant now than at the time of its release on August 29, but it also serves to reflect on the role of journalism regarding the current conflict. If there is really good work being done in how the acts of terrorism from Palestine are covered, but also the reprisals, in the form of state terrorism and, probably, genocide in the face of history, of the nation of Israel.
September 5 is a tough but tremendously interesting film that is now available for streaming on Paramount. And you shouldn’t miss the opportunity because few films have managed to better capture the underlying conflict in all journalistic work between the duty to inform and the awareness that, perhaps, what is being done is part of the problem.
