January 13, 2025 · Watch the official trailer
The persistent rise of cinematic biopics has a created a deficit in an equally valuable piece of filmmaking.
Over the past several decades, there has been a noticeably sharp and steady decline in what is often known as docudrama, historically-based cinema that is only fiction in a very loose sense, that captures and chronicles moments in time in ways that transport audiences to other worlds that they may not be familiar with or see events they lived through from a different perspective.
Swiss writer/director Tim Fehlbaum takes audiences on a terse yet incredibly topical journey through the 1972 Berlin Summer Olympics where the Israeli team was taken captive and later murdered by terrorists and yet trains his camera far from the actual violence.
His film “September 5” almost entirely focuses on a team of broadcast journalists from ABC's sports department covering the Olympics live for the first time at the seemingly normal end to their workday when unprecedented events create a night of chaos unfolding in the distance. Shown from the perspective of a team of producers in a control room with off-screen reporters providing intelligence, the crew frantically attempts to cover the story without becoming a part of it.
It's a richly unique cinematic angle from which to tell a harrowing story highlighting the important work that journalists do covering breaking news in a pre-internet era that faces a similar desire to get the news quickly and first while trying to balance being factual and objective in their coverage.
Their internal struggles about the best way to present events fairly and ethically provides also provides a unique moral compass for examination in a world of “fake news.”
Peter Sarsgaard leads a talented ensemble cast portraying the ABC sports team thrust into hard news coverage and while many scripts might center the entire narrative around his executive producer Roone Arledge, Sarsgaard fares much better here as his gravitas has more impact in smaller, fragmented sections of “September 5” that allow viewers to understand different elements of the team’s coverage in real time.
John Magaro is exceptional as an unproven director challenged with creating a brand-new program on the fly while coordinating with competing interests on and off screen, while Leonie Benesch’s Marianne is a force unto herself as the German translator volunteering to assist in factfinding while risking her own life to do so.
Among the film’s smaller roles, it’s uncanny how close to the real person Benjamin Walker feels to then-reporter Peter Jennings.
The sharpest part of “September 5” that really ramps up the urgency of the narrative and keeps dramatic tension is the crisp somewhat rapid-fire nature of the film's editing and editor Hansjörg Weißbrich does a masterful job of engagingly swapping back and forth between different viewpoints within each scene as if he is at the control board of the ABC studio itself that Fehlbaum highlights several times throughout “September 5.”
This also enhances the somewhat claustrophobic nature of the setting, keeping the actors bunched into tight spaces and feeling much closer to the danger than they actually are. More importantly, however, it reinforces the ensemble nature of the cast and keeps audiences from being too narrow minded and focused in on one character's point of view on the crew should present the news to a world waiting with bated breath.
With Paramount Studios yanking the film around its release calendar multiple times before its wide theatrical release this coming weekend, it’s unlikely that “September 5” will garner much awards attention outside of a potential editing nomination.
An exceptionally taut and terse docudrama that borders on thriller, “September 5” won’t see the sort of box office success that it might have in the early 2000s, but it’s still well worth seeking out now or when it eventually lands on the Paramount+ streaming service.
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