September 5 director Tim Fehlbaum on dramatizing the live coverage of the 1972 Olympics crisis
The Swiss filmmaker discusses his new thriller and the questions it asks about crisis reporting
We're so used to watching live breaking news on our phones and TVs that it can be hard to imagine or easy to forget a time when that just wasn't done.
Tim Fehlbaum's new film, September 5, dramatizes how a small crew of ABC Sports journalists led the live coverage of the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which was the first time in history that the Games could be broadcast live via satellite around the world.
"These games were a game changer, so to say, for media history," the Swiss director tells Q guest host Talia Schlanger in an interview. "You had, before, live broadcasts of the Olympics, but not around the whole globe."
The Munich Games were also incredibly important for Germany, as they marked the first return of the Olympics to a German city since the 1936 Games in Berlin, which Adolf Hitler had misused as a platform to propagate Nazi ideology.
"Germany wanted to send out this image of the new liberal Germany to the world … so they were setting up an unprecedented technical apparatus for the coverage of these Games," Fehlbaum explains. "For the first time, the venues were designed for optimal TV coverage … and then suddenly, on this day, this whole apparatus switched from reporting on sports events to reporting on this tragedy."
On Sept. 5, the Palestinian militant organization Black September stormed the Olympic Village, where they immediately killed two Israeli athletes and took nine more hostage. Ultimately, all of the Israeli hostages lost their lives. As the crisis unfolded in real-time, nearly one billion people watched from around the world.
While the events of this day have already been covered several times on-screen (Fehlbaum says the documentary One Day in September had a particularly big impact on him), his film tackles the story from a brand new angle.
"The new thing about our movie is what an important role the media played on that day, and what a watershed moment it also was, generally, for live broadcasting and for television," he says.
In his research, Fehlbaum learned that ABC Sports was the only outlet to have a live camera on site that day. Suddenly, a group of sports reporters were forced to navigate complex ethical questions as they contended with an unprecedented situation.
"One of the most basic things about our premise is that it wasn't people that were experienced or trained in crisis reporting," he says. "A few hours before, they were covering a swim race at the Olympics…. In a way, they almost had an innocent view on all of this."
Fehlbaum says September 5 opens up important questions about how the media covers a crisis, such as if it's OK to show violence on TV, which are still relevant to us today.
"It's a very complex topic, and in our movie, we try not to give simple answers because I actually think there are no simple answers," he tells Schlanger. "We just think it is important that, hopefully, the audience will walk out of the movie and reflect on how we consume news today."
The full interview with Tim Fehlbaum is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Tim Fehlbaum produced by Lise Hosein.
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