One Day in September

Kevin Macdonald’s One Day in September documents 21 hours during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, when a small group of Palestinian guerrillas called Black September took 11 Israeli athletes and coaches hostage. The film illustrates the mounting fears and resentments that shaped the crisis (with a "ticking" digital clock to mark time and slow-motion imagery to showcase key events), which climaxed in a fatal shootout with ill-prepared police snipers at the Munich airport. All the hostages were killed. The film ambitiously presents a range of perspectives, including interviews with the only surviving guerrilla (now living with his family somewhere in Africa under heavy security, as his fellows have been killed in intervening years by the Israeli terrorist group, the Mossad) and the widow of one of the Israeli victims, as well as German authorities and the ex-head of the Israeli Secret Service. These talking heads appear alongside 1972 ABC News footage (in which Jim McKay and Peter Jennings appear increasingly fatigued and distressed) and diagrams, all demonstrating, in the end, the astonishing ineptitude and arrogance of the Olympic Committee (who only halted the Games when pressured by international outcry) and police (who attempted a SWAT-style invasion of the Olympic Village room where the hostages were held, only to call it off when they realized that their movements were visible on TV in that very room). The film doesn’t pretend to be "objective," but presents various subjectivities, much in the fashion of Errol Morris’ work (Philip Glass’ score underlines this comparison). Most effectively, the film shows that the Games are by definition political and commercial, despite and because of claims to the contrary: As Mark Spitz and Olga Korbut became media stars, the film argues, the hostages (and their captors) were trapped in a horrific real-time drama.