Tim Fehlbaum’s tense drama “September 5” is tightly focused on a group of real-life male American journalists responding to the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. But one of the most essential characters in the film is fictional. She’s a woman. She’s German. And she’s not a journalist.
Marianne Gebhardt, played by Leonie Benesch, is a translator in the ABC Sports office during the attack by the Palestinian militant organization Black September. Eleven members of the Israeli team were murdered by the terrorists or killed in a failed rescue attempt. As journalists Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) and Jim McKay (in archival footage woven into the film) struggle to understand what is happening and to communicate it to the world, Gebhardt is an indispensable part of the team as the one person in the room who speaks German.