'September 5' focuses on news, not Jews, in dramatizing 1972 Munich attack on Israeli Olympians

in Munich, and in that city, he said, "this tragedy is still very present."

One through-line in the film is that the Olympics, the first to take place in Germany since the Games Hitler hosted in 1936, were meant to "welcome to the world to a new Germany," in the words of a German official, at a time when World War II and the Holocaust were still in living memory for most people.

Mark Spitz, a Jewish American swimmer, won seven gold medals, and the producers are depicted discussing whether to ask Spitz about "winning gold in Hitler's backyard." Among the massive amount of archival footage in the film is one of Spitz's wins, as well as a feature about the Israeli Olympians, including American-Israeli wrestler David Berger, visiting Dachau days before they met their deaths.

Peter Sarsgaard plays famed ABC Sports executive Roone Arledge, while ABC anchor Jim McKay, who led the coverage that day, appears only in archival footage.

September 5" is at least the third major motion picture about the hostage crisis. "One Day in September," Kevin Macdonald's Oscar-winning documentary from 1999 about the Munich crisis, was a major influence on the film, Fehlbaum said.

As for the other major film about the massacre, Steven Spielberg's 2005 "Munich," it's very different, focusing mainly on the aftermath of the tragedy, on Israel's campaign of revenge, and how one fictional soldier, Eric Bana's Avner, became disillusioned with it.

"Steven Spielberg, I mean, that's of course a big influence on me, regardless of 'Munich,' all of his films, generally," Fehlbaum said. "'Munich,' of course, also we studied carefully, but ... our film has a very different perspective on this tragedy."