Film reviews: September 5 | The Seed of the Sacred Fig

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (15) ★★★★

Revisiting the day in 1972 when the Palestinian terrorist group Black September stormed the Munich Olympics and took the Israeli team hostage, September 5 dramatises the behind-the-scenes efforts of American television network ABC to get the story out as the crisis was unfolding, giving them the dubious distinction of being the first to broadcast a terrorist incident on live television.

Co-written and directed by Swiss filmmaker Tim Fehlbaum, and set almost entirely in the ABC control room (which was just metres from the Olympic Village), it’s a fascinating way into an already much-covered event. Unlike Kevin Macdonald’s forensic Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September (which contextualised the story with testimony from survivors on both sides) or Steven Spielberg’s Munich (which turned the Israeli government’s ruthless response into a meditation on vengeance for a post-9/11 world), the new film transforms the unfurling chaos into a drum-tight procedural to show how the efforts of a few dedicated journalists, producers and technicians arguably set in motion the era of rolling news.

Not that this was the plan. We see the crew of ABC making ethical decisions on the fly as they set about finding ways to broadcast the stand-off between the inept German authorities and Black September, little realising the impact they’re going to have as they roll enormous studio cameras outside to provide live feeds and figure out ways to sneak 16mm film stock into and out of the restricted Olympic Village to get those soon-to-be indelible images of masked terrorists on the balconies of the Israeli athletes’ apartments. Using grainy film stock and actual archival material, part of the tension comes from the way the film smartly captures the analogue limitations of the day to show the sheer effort, skill and improvised innovations it took to bring those images to the world.

Our entry point is Geoffrey Mason (Ben Magaro), the young studio director charged with overseeing that day’s coverage. Presented here as a harassed new addition to the team, we see him arrive for the dayshift armed with scheduling info about boxing and fencing events, only to be thrown into the eye of the storm after the first gunshots are heard. Though Mason is soon caught between the differing approaches of veteran producer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and network executive Roone Alredge (Peter Sarsgaard), the film refuses to amp up or demonise any character — all are dedicated professionals trying to figure out how to responsibly cover such an unprecedented event when it’s not clear what lines can or can’t be crossed on live TV.

There’s strong support too from French-Algerian actor Zinedine Soualem as the engineer Jacques Lesgards, whose Arabic heritage the film uses to subtly layer in additional levels of context regarding the wider political issues at stake. Meanwhile, the superb German actor Leonie Benesch effectively becomes the second lead as Marianne Gebhardt, a fictionalised character whose presence as an interpreter for ABC taps into the hopes of a younger generation of Germans trying to move past the horrors of the Holocaust — a mission statement of the Munich Olympics as well.

But what’s really impressive is the way Fehlbaum (Oscar-nominated for best screenplay) uses dramatic irony to keep us on the edge of our seats while teasing out larger themes. When he juxtaposes archival footage of the hostage crisis with coverage of athletes lounging around other parts of the Olympic village, the effect is surreal and chilling, reminiscent of Jonathan Glazer’s recent Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, but also reflective of the way the barrage of news in the modern age can desensitise any of us to atrocity. The film is full of small moments like these, negating the the need to explicitly draw contemporary parallels.

“This film was made in secret,” declare the opening titles of Oscar-nominated Iranian drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig. “When there is no way, a way must be made.” Inspired by the anti-hijab protests that saw women and girls take to the streets to demonstrate against Iran’s misogynistic and theocratic rule, fugitive director Mohammad Rasoulof’s urgent drama uses startling smartphone footage of the protests to punctuate a more conventionally shot story of familial discord built around a newly appointed state investigator (Missagh Zareh) whose promotion creates a rift between him, his wife (Soheila Golestani) and their two increasingly politicised daughters (Setareh Malek and Mahsa Rostami).

What follows is a sprawling saga with some unexpected genre conventions, the latter related to a missing gun that, at one point, even gives rise to an unexpected car chase. If some of these elements seem jarringly awkward, Rasoulof manages to build up so much tension and paranoia between his characters that it’s easy to go with the flow, especially as the story eventually takes on more symbolic connotations related to the title and the struggle for survival in hostile environments.

September 5 and The Seed of the Sacred Fig in cinemas from 7 February

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