You don't see many documentaries in the cinema these days, agrees director Kevin MacDonald. Documentary film-making is almost completely restricted to television, and is ploughing an increasingly limited furrow as budgets come down, with cheap technology used as an excuse for lowering standards. So MacDonald, a brother of Trainspotting and The Beach producer, Andrew, decided to set out to make a documentary which would play by the rules of genre drama feature films. The resulting film, One Day in September, is self-consciously constructed along the lines of a thriller, as MacDonald freely admits. "One of our models for this film was Oliver Stone's JFK, which covers another media-saturated event and works within the thriller genre."
One Day in September tells the story of the seizure of Israeli athletes by the extreme Palestinian group, Black September, during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, and the violent events which followed. The concept grew out of discussions between MacDonald and his producer, John Battsek, who wanted to pursue a smaller project after his disastrous experience producing the costume drama, Serpent's Kiss, in Ireland. "My initial idea was to do something about 1970s terrorism - Baader-Meinhof and all that - and John wanted to do a documentary about sport, which doesn't interest me at all. So this was a natural subject, because it contained both elements."
He freely admits that, since the film has been shown, he has learned a lot about the pitfalls of making a film on such a controversial subject. One Day in September has been attacked in Israel and Germany as being flawed, incomplete and partial (when we talked, during the Dublin Film Festival, there had not yet been much Palestinian reaction, but the film has since been fiercely attacked by the writer Edward Said for its depiction of the political context surrounding the events). "I've learned since the film has been shown that you can't please everyone with a subject as politically sensitive as this," says MacDonald.
"It would be like doing a documentary about the Northern Ireland conflict, except even more than that, because you've got Jewish interests around the world, not just in America as you get with Irish politics and its not quite as vociferous anyway.
"The responses have been so diverse. I've been amazed at how positive people who are outside the politics of it are. But in Israel, there've been a lot of problems. A lot of people there think that you shouldn't put terrorists on television, which is a familiar argument in this part of the world. Also, I was criticised for not putting these events in context. But I figured that people knew the broad outline of that sort of stuff, and if they didn't know it they weren't going to come to the film anyway. So I just wanted to focus on these specific events. That's why I called it One Day in September."
I mention that I have some serious reservations of my own about elements of the film, such as the apparently gratuitous use of photographs of the dead bodies of the victims. "I understand that point of view, and members of the victims' families have objected to the use of those very gruesome photographs. It's a complicated situation, because we were given permission to use them by one branch of a family, and there was a political division amongst the survivors' groups. Some people were right on our side, from the left because they didn't like censorship and from the right because they wanted the consequences to be shown.
"The argument I made to the representatives of the families is that this story is 28 years old now. They feel that they've never been told the truth, and that the Germans have covered it up. They've launched legal challenges to try to get hold of papers, but they're just hitting a brick wall. My argument was that this story has been gone over so many times with no conclusion, you're only going to make headway if you appal and shock people. Also, a lot of the film is composed of long shots and fuzzy footage, and we felt we had to show that stuff to bring home the reality of it. At the end of the film, people are left feeling appalled, outraged and sad."
To be fair, part of my own response to those images may have been conditioned by the choice of music to accompany them, a screeching Deep Purple heavy metal track. MacDonald strongly argues that this apparently inappropriate juxtaposition was entirely justified. "The obvious way to deal with that is to put very mournful, classical music over it. I didn't want to do the obvious thing; I wanted it to be angry and not just sad at the idiocy of it. Some people have found that too much, and I actually had the opportunity to change it. But I still think it's the right thing to do."
He sees Munich as a turning point in modern history in many ways. "Maybe here in Ireland you'd understand it more, because it's very much like Bloody Sunday, which is not just about the number of people who died. In the larger scheme of things that's relatively insignificant. It's about it as a symbol, a crucial event in Anglo-Irish relations. In the same way, this was a crucial event in the history of the Olympics, and of Arab-Israeli relations, of terrorism and counter-terrorism. It changed Israeli attitudes to lots of things; it's one of the things that defined Israel as a nation."
It's also not exactly Germany's finest moment. The attitude of the German authorities during the crisis, according to the film, combined incompetence, insensitivity and arrogance in equal measure, with disastrous consequences. Perhaps it's not surprising that One Day in September was having difficulties securing a distribution deal in Germany? "Well, it's hard to get a documentary distributed anywhere, and it's even harder in a country whose cinema-going habits are as philistine as they are in German," says MacDonald. "The Germans do come out of it very badly. I don't think it's that consciously they didn't care, but there was so much angst and guilt that they shot themselves in the foot. There's also the fact that they refused to listen to anyone else."
He believes that some of the attacks on the film in the German media are politically inspired. "But I've been attacked from all sides, with people writing about how it's journalistically suspect. One person said to me that, if that's the case, I must be doing something right, but I don't know if that's true."
ONE of the reasons the film is now receiving so much attention is that it won the Oscar for Best Documentary this year, to the astonishment of the audience, the pundits and - especially - director Wim Wenders, who clearly believed that he was just showing up to collect the statuette for his hugely popular Buena Vista Social Club. MacDonald didn't see Wenders after the show. "He stormed out - or at least he left at the next commercial break. He's very bitter about it. But his film has made $20 million and won every prize in the world."
He admits that he was just as shocked as anyone else, when the winner was announced. "A few days later, a friend of mine sent me a newspaper clipping from New York, with a list of `Best Dressed', `Best Speech' and so on, and I was `Most Surprised'. I had gone out about five days beforehand to do the pre-Oscar circuit, and I was amazed by the number of people who came up to me and said: `I think you're in with a shot'. So we thought we had a five per cent chance.
"I think a lot of traditional documentary people didn't like The Buena Vista Social Club; they thought it was a souped-up music video with bits of documentary in between, whereas our film had a serious documentary purpose. Our film has its critics as well, because of the use of music, the strong narrative, the lack of analysis. But we very much set out to make a thriller that would work on the big screen, because so few documentaries on serious subjects do."
The book One day in September, which accompanies the documentary, is reviewed in Weekend 8
