Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum’s “September 5,” which premiered on Thursday at the Venice International Film Festival, takes a story that seems to call for an expansive approach and situates it almost entirely within a couple of dark rooms. It focuses on a real event, the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and turns it into a procedural that follows not the terrorists or the athletes or the authorities, but the overworked crew of TV reporters trying to figure out how to cover an attack that took the world by surprise.
“September 5” is hardly the first film to deal with what became known as the Munich massacre – the documentary “One Day in September” won an Oscar in 1999, and Steven Spielberg dealt with Israel’s reprisals in “Munich” six years later – but it’s one that finds a new way into a story that has become sadly familiar.