Product: One Day in September [VHS] (2006)
Rating: 5.0
This tells more than I expected to know
There are a number of amazing things in this video. This DVD dates back to a time when peaceful competition between national teams was what everyone expected in the Munich Olympic Games of 1972, and even the 1999 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature was before 9/11/2001 made the war on terrorism a daily concern for more people than had previously worried about how the rest of the world matters. Whoever expected to see a documentary in which a group of Germans decided that they were about to engage in a suicide mission and unanimously voted not to attempt what they had been planning to do? People who are inclined to keep track of how often governments lie might be interested in who first announced that the hostages had all been saved, and the terrorists killed. It becomes obvious during the film that one terrorist is still alive, on camera, and you can almost see who he is.The ending of the film was most remarkable for me. Some government maintains such close contact with the terrorist organizations that it was able, within a few weeks, to arrange a hijacking of a flight to Frankfurt that could be used as a cover for the release of the three survivors, in the interest of maintaining peace with the Palestinian cause for which an enormous amount of publicity had been generated by the event. Few will doubt that two of those survivors have probably died as a result of assassination teams, and it is likely that some government is keeping track of who has been getting killed, so the identity of the survivor at the end is only a secret for people who don't need to know. You can learn a lot else from watching this, and you can even listen to a few lines in German. There might be German subtitles for people who know how to pick the setting. There weren't many other DVD options, but the English subtitles hepled me a lot.