‘Can we show an act of violence on TV?’ New thriller tells story of Munich hostage massacre

The 1972 Munich Olympics were the first to be broadcast live by global satellite from continent to continent. As the first Games on German soil since Berlin 1936, organisers were keen to use the media to present a postwar liberal image to the world.

In the US, it was ABC sports that held the exclusive licence to broadcast the images. The sleepy crew were in the middle of a night shift, after Mark Spitz took home his seventh swimming gold of the Games, when gunshots rang out through the Olympic village, shortly after dawn.

The story of that production team, who had to suddenly switch from boxing and volleyball to live, 24-hour coverage of a hostage siege that ended with the death of 11 Israeli athletes is now being told in a newsroom thriller that premiered at Venice last week.

“The events of September 5 were streamed to 900 million people. It was the first time a terror attack reached a global audience during a live broadcast,” said Tim Fehlbaum, the Swiss director behind September 5.

“The ABC sports team were the only ones that had a live camera on the building where the hostages were being held. But they had no experience or training in reporting on crisis situations. These were people used to reporting on sports, that had to make the switch to geopolitical events. People who were suddenly confronted with the moral and ethical dilemmas, like can we show an act of violence on TV?”

The film is produced by Sean Penn and stars Peter Sarsgaard as Roone Arledge, the ABC executive in charge of broadcasting the games; Ben Chaplin as Marvin, the team’s head of operations; John Magaro as Geoff, a young and ambitious producer striving to prove himself to his boss; and Leonie Benesch as a local German translator.

It blends grainy archival footage from the day with behind-the-scenes dramatisations of the key players who fought to capture every twist and turn of the siege. And though the logistical difficulties they faced seems antiquated now – like having to smuggle 16mm film stock behind police cordons and communicating by walkie talkies – in many ways the film also speaks to our time.

“Today everybody has a camera in their pocket, news can be live streamed everywhere at every point,” Fehlbaum said. “But while the technology obviously has changed, I think the moral and ethical questions still remain the same.”

While mainstream news broadcasting mostly filters out images of graphic violence, the director said it’s a very different picture on social media. “The ability to live stream and photograph tragic events, and to get informed, are increasing rapidly. We don’t know yet what the implications of that are yet, but I thought it could be interesting for an audience that are used to seeing everything on their smartphones.”

The matter is especially timely – half a century on from Munich, global conflicts, including that between Israel and the Palestinians, continues to rage with horrific casualties. But social media and the democratisation of information has meant there is no shortage of unmediated, graphic images accessible on huge platforms that reach hundreds of millions.

It poses stark questions of whether it’s right to show the realities of extreme violence, whether it propagates the message of perpetrators, or even desensitises us to suffering. Fehlbaum said the film doesn’t attempt to answer these questions, merely highlights them.

“It’s a dilemma, because sometimes these shocking images can have a positive effect, like in the case of George Floyd,” he said. The director was keen to stress that the film does not intend to make a statement on current political events – it was wrapped up before the attack by Hamas on 7 October and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza. “It’s a reflection on a topic that seemed relevant when the media landscape is constantly evolving: the power of images.”

Sarsgaard said September 5 was “a very important story to be telling right now”.

As someone with both Israeli and Palestinian friends, he said it’s driven home to him how “everyone is consuming things through their own lens. This idea that a live camera pointed at something will be the truth is just never correct, because you’ve decided where to put the camera. You’ve decided where to aim it.

“So we have to look for ways to understand what’s going on, to step into other people’s point of view and try to get as many different angles on the same event as possible.”

Sarsgaard doesn’t consider the Israel-Palestine conflict to be a two-sides issue in any case. “The British are culpable. The US is culpable. Iran is culpable. We’re all in it together. It’s so much bigger than these two parties that are on the front lines.”

The context of the ongoing war in the Middle East has shaped not only how this film is being seen, but also triggered controversy over some other films in the Venice line-up.

Earlier this week at the festival, around 300 film-makers signed an open letter protesting at two Israeli films screening at Venice – Dani Rosenberg’s Of Dogs and Men, which is set against the backdrop of 7 October, and Amos Gitai’s Why War, which is based on a correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud about how humanity could avoid war.