September 5: a solid and pedago thriller (critic)
The tragedy of the Munich Olympics seen from behind the scenes of a TV channel. A reflection on the media delivered in the form of a studious film.
The hostage -taking and the execution of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists, during the Munich Olympic Games in September 1972, were already abundantly covered by the cinema, from the Oscar -winning documentary of Kevin Macdonald One day in September At Munich from Spielberg. Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum (The colony) Choose to come back to the facts from a very specific point of view: that of the team of sports reporters of the American channel ABC, who found himself covering live tragedy live, in front of hundreds of millions of viewers, quite simply Because their editorial staff was a few steps from the Olympic village, and they could therefore rob their camera on the epicenter of events.
Fehlbaum identifies on September 5, 1972 as the birth certificate of continuous info, the improvised opening of a Pandora box that will shape the sugar media space of images in which we live today. But rather than asserting a thesis, he leaves spectators the opportunity to debate, leaving the room, ethical choices made in an emergency by the journalists of ABC Sports, and prefers to focus on the very concrete way in which The news was made that day, in an analog world where DIY was the rule.
The result is a studious, applied, very pedagogical thriller (probably a little too much), whose modesty is the main quality, and which hits its rigor and its spirit of seriousness on the group of professionals in shirt arms which it depicts.
By Tim Fehlbaum. With John Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin… Duration 1h35. Release on February 5, 2025
