San Francisco Frontiers - Taut Munich Olympics thriller explores media and terror

"September 5", which was nominated for best drama at the Golden Globes, had a limited release in the United States in December and will hit screens internationally in the coming weeks.

It recounts the struggles and ethical dilemmas faced by the ABC news crew as they find themselves switching from athletics and boxing to covering an attack on the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian militants.

One of the most infamous moments in Olympics history came just as live television was taking off, but was still several years before the advent of rolling news channels and decades from the social media livestreaming of today.

"The Munich Olympic Games were a turning point in media history, in terms of the media apparatus for broadcasting," Fehlbaum told AFP during an interview in Paris.

"The point that we wanted to make is how technology has an influence on the media, and in that way, also has an influence on how we perceive news events."

"September 5" depicts a media landscape far away from today's world of online disinformation and media organisations in crisis.

In the early 1970s, cameras were shooting with 16mm film, telephones used fixed lines and graphics were constructed manually -- all re-created by Fehlbaum, a self-confessed "geek", in luscious detail.

- 'Tough' decisions -

Despite the mistakes made by the ABC crew, the 42-year-old Swiss-German director said he had sympathy for them and by extension to other professional journalists making split-second decisions during breaking news coverage.

"My respect has only grown for people working in that field," he said.

"Today when I watch the news or when I watch the Olympics, I know now how gigantic the apparatus is and how many decisions are made in the background, and how tough it is to make these decisions."

Fehlbaum's cameras almost never leave the ABC gallery where sweaty news producers must decide what to broadcast, with the actors often seen in dialogue with real-world archive footage broadcast that day.

The film does not linger on the lives of the victims or explore the motives of the perpetrators, the Palestinian militant group Black September.

"We wanted to tell a story about media, about the media perspective," Fehlbaum said.

Editing for the film had already finished by the time Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 last year, leaving 1,208 people dead, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza has left around 47,000 people dead and over 110,000 people wounded, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza.

"Of course, what happened in the meantime will have an influence on how people will see this movie," Fehlbaum said, adding that it invited questions about "how we inform ourselves and how the current conflict is being reported".

Foreign news organisations have been barred from Gaza and media freedom organisation RSF said in December that journalism was in danger of "extinction" in the territory because of attacks by Israel on Palestinian reporters.

G.Collins--SFF