Although from a strictly aesthetic and dramatic perspective, the first and last cinematic word on the 1972 Munich Olympics tragedy will probably always be the breathlessly paced One Day in September (1999), which dramatically pieced together the horrific events sparked by the Palestinian terror group Black September’s infiltration of the Olympic Village to hold Israeli athletes hostage, a globally televised event that ended in a chaotic airport showdown that saw 11 Israeli Olympians senselessly murdered in cold blood.
Although Director Francine Zuckerman’s After Munich can’t possibly match One Day’s ambitions as a tightly woven, suspenseful documentary, the film has its own agenda: to focus on events that occurred in the wake of Munich in ’72. The film does this through the unique perspectives of three different women who were firsthand observers of the massacre or played a part in trying to see justice done to the Israeli victims and their loved ones.
Ankie Spitzer, a prominent interviewee in One Day in September, also plays a major part here as the most outspoken activist personality in this film, widow of slain Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, whose tireless efforts to get an official memorial for the 11 victims has taken over forty years. Her efforts expose the bizarre reluctance of the Olympic Committee to bring attention to the disaster in any way.
Esther Roth Shahamorov, another of the film’s featured female subjects, is a running coach who lost her coach in the ’72 massacre, which cut her Olympic ambitions short. The film’s peripheral (but no less important) focal points are the enigmatic Sylvia Raphael, a mystery-shrouded Mossad agent who, along with fellow agent Marianne Gladnikoff, was involved in a case of murderous mistaken identity. He went to Norway to assassinate one of the PLO ringleaders only to bump off the wrong man, leading to a huge cover-up by the Israeli government. (Raphael died in 2005, so her segments are fictionally reenacted.)
But it’s in this particular incident of the wrongful death of a Palestinian where moral ambiguity creeps into a story that was previously a clear-cut divide between terrorists and innocent victims. Although lacking the white-knuckled dramatics of One Day, After Munich is certainly a worthwhile addendum to previous cinematic depictions of the tragedy of the 1972 Summer Olympics. Recommended.