Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19123 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-09-10
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 94 minutes

Synopsis
ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER is a unique and powerful documentary that tells an important story in an exciting and dramatic style that one doesn't typically associate with the genre. The film is about the Black September terrorist action at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It relies on interviews and archival news footage of the actual events, which personalise the story of the doomed Israeli athletes and the Palestinian terrorists who held them captive while the world held its collective breath. Also documented, in painful detail, is the astonishing ineptitude and indifference of the West German police and the insensitivity of the International Olympic Committee. Director Kevin MacDonald makes excellent use of news footage, promotional films, and the music of the early 1970s. He also uses interviews with many of those involved, including an on-camera interview with surviving terrorist Jamal Al Gashey and an in-depth interview with Ankie Spitzer, the widow of one of the Israeli coaches who was killed. But what makes the film so compelling is the shrewd way MacDonald brings these elements together to make a suspenseful, heartbreaking record of this tragic event. MacDonald sought to make a documentary thriller with this film, and he succeeded.

Customer Reviews

Better than a feature
If you do not watch documentaries, watch this and you will be converted. The slow release onto the celluloid is mesmerising and compelling: it just keeps getting better and better.

No padding, no dodgy dialogue, no script boobs; just an incredible story packed into a relatively short period of screen-time. It feels as though every image, every frame has been chosen specifically to drive the story.

Basically, this film sucks you in, grabs you by the neck and delivers such a painful sucker-punch that it leaves you shaking, quite literally.

Buy it, watch it and wonder how the hell someone let the mess in 1972 ever happen.

Compelling

This is the best way to learn about the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian terrorists. Narrated by Michael Douglas, includes an interview with one the terrorists - who shows no regret - and relatives the Israelis who were killed.

It runs for 90 minutes and is as good as the Spielberg movie (minus the last 30 minutes), It won an academy award for best documentary in 2000. Includes archive footage and CGI to represent the events.

After watching the movie you might feel angry at the incompetence of German government and the cruelty of the terrorist, who used the last efforts to kill the surviving Israelis.

The only extras are subtitles and a trailer.

LESSONS IN TERRORISM, 1972 TO PRESENT
This is the documentary version of the true events concerning the Palestinian terrorists capture of the Israeli athletics squad in the 1972 Munich Olympics. Mark Spitz, the Jewish American won seven gold medals at these Olympics. This is an impressive, Oscar-winning documentary, and reveals the staggeringly amateur handling of the whole event by West German security forces at the time, and the duplicity and cowardice of the later deal to release the three terrorists who were captured that night in the gunfight at the airport. It relies heavily on actual footage of the newsreels of the time and interviews with the relatives of the athletes and the police chiefs of that time, nearly thirty years after the events. The film most directly brought to mind is the fairly recent and excellent thriller 'Munich', which tells the story of the revenge of Mossad on those who were responsible, some while after the event. The truth is always stranger than fiction, and the story is so far from over it brings the news of then and of today together most disturbingly.