of any crime and they die and therefore naturally your sympathies are for them, not for Israel as such. There's very little politics in the film actually. We deliberately decided not to. We had an interview for example with a Palestinian, who was involved on a senior political level with the Black September movement but we decided not to use that because it was very political and we wanted to steer clear of that. We wanted to tell the story clearly because the facts are so amazing and let people make their own minds up and actually I've been please by how people have not thought the film was too politically biased. Anything to do with the Middle East, to do with Arab-Israeli question, you're never going to please everybody. In fact you're probably not going to please anybody, other than the people involved. There has been some criticism in Israel and there'll doubtless be criticism in the Palestinian territories and in Germany but that's a good sign as far as I'm concerned. The film was John's idea. He is himself Jewish but at the time of the events in Munich he was a small child. So why did the subject capture his interest? John : I have a clear memory of being in my kitchen in Hampstead Garden Suburb where I lived watching the balaclavad terrorists on the balcony and listening to David Coleman commentating on it. That is as far as my memories of it go, and what