One Day in September

On September 5th, 1972, during the Munich Olympics, members of a radical Palestinian group, Black September, infiltratred the under-guarded Olympic Village and killed two members of the Israeli team, taking nine others hostage. During the succeeding hours, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir refused the Palestinian demands to free hundreds of prisoners and the German authorities proved hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the crisis.

This astonishing documentary, which won the Oscar this year, is, on one level, a gripping, edge-of-the-seat thriller. British director Kevin McDonald has managed to interview the one surviving member of the Black September unit, and his contribution is vitally important to the film`s success. We also meet the families of two of the Israelis who died, and there are interviews with many officials and witnesses, as well as all the tv footage that was shot at the time. Though I remember the incident vividly (I was in Rome that day), I`d forgotten many of the details, so that the film, as it inexorably unfolds, kept surprising me. A fine example of reworking newsreel material with interviews to tell a quite rounded story of a terrible tragedy, this is an outstanding film.