They were promoted as the Olympics of Peace and Joy, but one group had other ideas. In Munich in 1972, eight members of Black September, a far-right Palestinian terrorist group, stormed the Olympic village and took eleven Israeli team members hostage while the outside world watched in horror and outrage. All eleven of the Israelis were murdered. One Day in September, the 1999 Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature, chronicles how this dreadfully historic incident unfolded.
The irony, as the movie also covers, is that Germany's hopes for the Munich Olympics were to rehabilitate Germany's international image and erase memories of the 1936 Berlin Games, which were held under the Third Reich. Scottish director Kevin Macdonald, who's since made 2003's Touching the Void and 2006's narrative effort The Last King of Scotland, explores both sides of this fiasco by interviewing relatives of the casualties like Anouk Spitzer and Schlomit Romano, Olympic Village mayor Walter Troger and the last surviving terrorist, Abu Daoud. The interviews are powerfully candid and discreet, and Macdonald shrewdly avoids covering the "mixing sport and politics" territory for sincere impartiality and objectivity. However, he never shies away from confronting us with images of the horrific violence Black September committed, particularly regarding weightlifter Yossef Romano. Macdonald also cleverly uses archival news footage and period music from acts like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple with the kind of raw ferocity and immediacy that Black September showed very differently, and Justine Wright's editing is just seamless.
For me its grip loosens just slightly near the end, and with what happened just two years after its release, this film's title may initially sound misleading. But make no mistake, One Day in September genuinely holds up overall twenty years on as an emotional and suspenseful exploration of an event that changed sport, politics and culture forever. May the murdered Israelis continue to rest in peace.
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