One Day in September (1999)

Director:

Kevin Macdonald

Release Date:

24 August 2000 (Australia)

Genre:

Documentary | Crime | History | Sport

Plot:

The Palestinian terrorist group Black September holds Israeli athletes hostage at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich.

Plot Keywords:

Palestinian | Olympics | Hostage | Munich Olympics | Standoff

Awards:

Won Oscar. Another 3 wins & 5 nominations

Cast

Michael Douglas	...	Himself / Narrator (voice)
Ankie Spitzer	...	Herself
Jamal Al Gashey	...	Himself
Gerald Seymour	...	Himself
Axel Springer	...	Himself
Gad Zahari	...	Himself
Shmuel Lalkin	...	Himself
Manfred Schreiber	...	Himself
Walter Troger	...	Himself
Ulrich K. Wegener	...	Himself
Hans-Dietrich Genscher	...	Himself
Schlomit Romajo	...	Herself
Magdi Gahary	...	Himself
Zvi Zamir	...	Himself
Dan Shillon	...	Himself
Heinz Hohensinn	...	Himself
Esther Roth	...	Herself
Hans Jochen Vogel	...	Himself
Anouk Spitzer	...	Herself
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Howard Cosell	...	Himself (voice) (archive footage)
Peter Jennings	...	Himself (voice) (archive footage)
Jim McKay	...	Himself (archive footage)
Mark Spitz	...	Himself (archive footage)

Directed by
Kevin Macdonald

Produced by
John Battsek	....	producer
Lillian Birnbaum	....	executive producer
Arthur Cohn	....	producer
Andrew Ruhemann	....	associate producer

Original Music by
Alex Heffes

Cinematography by
Neve Cunningham
Alwin H. Kuchler		(as Alwin Küchler)

Film Editing by
Justine Wright

Production Management
Alice Henty	....	production manager
Dean Watkins	....	post-production supervisor

Sound Department
Amir Boberman	....	sound
Amir Boverman	....	sound recordist
Wilm Brucker	....	sound recordist
Gillian Dodders	....	dialogue editor
Mark Heslop	....	sound effects editor
Brendan Nicholson	....	sound re-recording mixer

Visual Effects by
Willi Geiger	....	research and development (uncredited)

Camera and Electrical Department
Philippe Bellaiche	....	additional camera operator
Raymond Depardon	....	special still photographer
Jeremy Forster	....	additional camera operator
Hans Albrecht Lusznat	....	additional camera operator

Animation Department
Peter Richardson	....	computer animator
Ravi Swami	....	computer animator

Editorial Department
Ian Davies	....	assistant editor
Ian Moffat	....	on-line editor
Nigel Shaw	....	colorist
Dominic Thomson	....	on-line editor

Music Department
Craig Armstrong	....	composer: additional music
Liz Gallacher	....	music supervisor

Other crew
Nick Fraser	....	executive: BBC
Lynn Goldner	....	production consultant
Dennis Hobbs	....	production accountant
Monica Maurer	....	researcher
Lin McConnell	....	researcher
Felix Moeller	....	researcher
Khalil Abed Rabbo	....	researcher
Jo Ralling	....	production consultant
Shanti Ramakuri	....	production coordinator
Alan Reich	....	production consultant
Peter Richardson	....	title designer
Felicitas Stark	....	researcher
Ravi Swami	....	title designer

Thanks
Roone Arledge	....	thanks
Tamar Ashuri	....	thanks
Micha Battsek	....	thanks
Hamish Crooks	....	thanks
Steve Devlin	....	thanks
Mike Devry	....	thanks
Fred Emery	....	thanks
Berndt Ender	....	thanks
Morris Green	....	thanks
Wendy Hedin	....	thanks
Wilfried Huismann	....	special thanks
Tom Jacomb	....	special thanks
Tim Jefferies	....	thanks
Peter Jennings	....	thanks
Nigel Karikari	....	thanks
Jo Lapping	....	thanks
Galit Levy-White	....	thanks
Sanford Lieberson	....	special thanks (as Sandy Lieberson)
Cameron McCracken	....	thanks
Nava Mizrahi	....	thanks
Richard Needham	....	thanks
Sebastian Palmer	....	thanks
Rak Patel	....	thanks
Thomas Reinecke	....	thanks
Ben Silverman	....	thanks
Sven Simon	....	acknowledgment: archival stills provided by
Anne Rechess Spitzer	....	special thanks
Charles Steele	....	special thanks
Jan Wiesener	....	thanks (as Dr. Jan Wiesener)

Production Companies

• Passion Pictures
• Arthur Cohn Productions
• British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
• British Screen Productions (collaboration)
• Dan Valley Film AG
• European Co-production Fund (collaboration)
• Soros Documentary Fund of the Open Society Movement (support)

Distributors

• Buena Vista International (2000) (Switzerland) (theatrical)
• Memento Films International (2006) (France) (theatrical)
• Memento Films (2006) (France) (theatrical)
• Sony Pictures Classics (2000) (USA) (theatrical)
• Bridge Entertainment Group (2002) (Netherlands) (DVD)
• Columbia TriStar Home Video (2001) (USA) (DVD)
• Columbia TriStar Home Video (2001) (USA) (VHS)
• Concorde Home Entertainment (2001) (Germany) (DVD)
• Home Box Office (HBO) (200?) (USA) (TV)
• Home Vision Entertainment (HVE) (2004) (USA) (DVD)
• Redbus Film Distribution (2000) (UK) (all media)
• SBS6 (2006) (Netherlands) (TV) (first national airing)
• Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2005) (USA) (DVD)

Other Companies

• ABC Network  archive
• Amateur Athletic Foundation  archive
• Belgarchive  archive
• CBS News Archives  archive
• Corbis  stills
• Deutsche Wochenschau  archive
• Edit Hire (New Technology)  thanks to
• Gaumont-Cinémathéque  archive
• IBA Television  archive
• ITN Archive  archive
• Magnum Photos  stills
• Mike Fraser  negative cutting
• NBC News Archives  archive
• NHK International  archive
• NOS Sales  archive
• OTAB  archive
• Reelsound  sound post-production
• Reuters  archive
• SOA  stills
• Sveriges Television (SVT)  archive
• TVP  archive
• Telepool  archive
• The Film Editors  thanks to
• The Soho Group  post-production
• Theodore Goddard  Passion Munich law firm
• United Press International (UPI)  stills
• ZDF Enterprises  archive
• dpa  stills

Also Known As:

MPAA:

Rated R for some graphic violent images

Runtime:

94 min

Country:

Switzerland | Germany | UK

Language:

English | German

Color:

Black and White | Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Singapore:PG | Iceland:12 | Netherlands:16 | Australia:MA | Germany:12 | UK:15 | USA:R

Company:

Passion Pictures

Quotes:

Jim McKay:When I was a kid my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They have now said there were eleven hostages; two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone.

Movie Connections:

Features "Munich 1972: Games of the XX Olympiad" (1972)

Soundtrack:

Short Piece 5

Contentious, exciting and full of dread.

In Britain at least, this film has been strongly criticised by hardly disinterested intellectual heavyweights like Edward Said and Tom Paulin. The main argument against the film is that it takes place in an historical vacuum, that it shows members of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team being taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists, but it does not explain the political reasons why this happened. This is largely true - although there is brief mention at the beginning of the horrific camp conditions Palestinians suffered in their own homeland appropriated by Israel, it says nothing about this highly contentious appropriation, about the natural urge to struggle against it.

This is underscored by a blatantly manipulative structure - while the representative of the hostages is (necessarily) solitary, anonymous, in hiding, talking in shadows (the other surviving terrorists were murdered by Israeli assassination squads; this information is recorded in a coda that

seems like some kind of chilling reward for the audience); the dead men are shown as almost saintly - pictured getting married, with babies, smiling, honest, healthy, sporty, part of a community and tradition - one story talks about the high-minded ideals of one coach who fraternised with his political enemies from Lebanon.

Aside from the dubious shamelessness of this manipulation, I don't really have a problem with the film's focus. Coming from a country where political terrorists have, for thirty years, been slaughtering wholesale largely apolitical citizens in the name of justice, who have used bogus political ideology as a front for gangsterism, I am somewhat out of sympathy with anything that proclaims humanitarian motives and leaves innocent people dead. Critics complain that ONE DAY ignores the story of the Palestinians, their feelings of repression and injustice - and it is unlikely a film on this subject will have a voiceover from a powerful Hollywood player, and win an Oscar - but to do this would abstract the event, would turn it into a political chess game, and not a ghastly abomination where real people, far too young, with families, are unaccountably murdered. It is the stuff of paranoid modernist literature - you wake up one morning with all your friends, and by sheer random chance, you're held hostage and killed.

So if we agree that the film is fatally biased, we can see that it has many virtues. ONE DAY has been called a thriller - it was literally so for me because I'd never heard about this atrocity - and the techniques used (the pounding score, the edgy editing, the foregrounding of clocks and deadlines, the withholding of explanatory, hindsight information) all contribute to a sense of almost unbearable tension. I don't know how this is for people (the majority) who know the story.

About half way through, as you begin to realise how things will probably turn out, the film stops being a thriller, and becomes an exercise in dread: time contracts, and you hope the film goes on forever so that the intolerable denouement is postponed. It is unbearable. But after the film you begin to question the ethics of all this. One of the themes of the film is the media treatment of the crisis, the reprehensible desire of the Olympic Committee to get it out of the way as quickly as possible - one victim's wife accuses the media of turning the crisis into a 'show'. But this is precisely what Macdonald does, turning human tragedy into an entertainment by turns kinetic and visceral.

Other plusses are the revelations of shocking, farcical German incompetence, desperate to reveal deNazification by having no security whatsoever; the callous, indifferent face-saving here by representatives of the police is the film's true, sickening, achievement. The brief montages of the sporting events, the whole point of the Olympics, are exhilirating, soundtracked to an uplifting Moog Bach, making you wonder why people can't make better sports movies.

ONE DAY has been compared to Errol Morris's documentaries, and you can see, superficially, why - the Phillip Glass score, the distortion of footage and time, the letting authority hang itself. But Morris, in a film like THE THIN BLUE LINE, is concerned not so much with presenting a truth as destroying the official version, exposing its weaknesses, repressions, lies. His recreated scenes, heightened images, distancing effects, all point to the artificiality of the official 'truth'. Morris uses documenatary's claim to authenticity and truth, to expose the inauthenticity of 'truth'. His is a critical cinema.

MacDonald, however, IS offering official truth here - there is no real difference between what he says and the ABC news reporter. This is not a critical film, pandering to firmly entrenched ideologies. Further, the documentary as a genre is limited. It can tell us about facts, analyses. It can reveal witness. There is an astonishing frisson in being able to see these terrorists walking and talking on the big screen, that projection of fantasies, like people, not mythical constructs. But documentary can never get at people's inner lives, and as this is what real life really is, documentaries seem thin and superficial, a betrayal of life. And so, finally, ironically, the victims DO become abstract - simply that, victims. We know there is more to people than a handful of photographs and highly partial witness.