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One Day in September

“For all its occasional naïvety and bias, Macdonald’s film is a riveting and hallucinatory recapitulation of 20th-century history. In 1945, the horrifying crimes of Germany lead to the foundation of the state of Israel, which in turn lead to the mass dispossession of the Palestinian people, and 27 years later the Germans, the Jews and the Arabs meet in a bloody, slapstick collision at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. On September 5, 1972, eight members of the Black September terrorist group attempted to draw attention to the Palestinian plight by disguising themselves as athletes at the Munich games and taking the Israeli athletes hostage. Within 24 hours all the hostages and all but three of the terrorists were dead in a bizarre tale of high drama, low cunning and bad faith, mainly on the part of the West German authorities – hapless, shrugging incompetents whom the film indicts as effectively complicit in the murder of the Israelis.

“The social and political fabric of 70s continental Europe, as revived in Macdonald’s film, has an unearthly strangeness: not larky retro naffness, but a weird mixture of paranoia and earnest liberalism. The idealism of the 60s was beginning to sour; anger and violence were becoming part of the currency of politics, but – yet to atone for the war – a faintly amnesiac social democracy and righteousness was being propagated in West Germany… Macdonald’s footage, though seen before, remains jaw-dropping. Interviews with an old Mossad chief make it clear that Israeli rage at this is still fresh, and they are still bitter about the fact that Germans refused to let the Israelis mount a rescue mission on their soil… If Macdonald’s film is tough on the Germans, it is lax and naïve about the Palestinian cause… the families of murdered Israeli athletes are extensively and sympathetically interviewed, and gruesome police pictures of the corpses are shown, but there is no balancing attempt to make sense of the Arab and Palestinian experience of oppression… But for all its faults, Macdonald’s documentary is very watchable: an under-reported chapter in the secret history of the 20th century.” — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 19/5/00