Alamo Drafthouse employees petition to scrap screenings of 1972 Munich film ‘September 5’
The petition calls the film ‘Zionist propaganda’
The cast of September 5, a control room thriller about the 1972 Munich massacre. Photo by ©2024 Paramount Pictures
By PJ Grisar January 13, 2025
Employees for New York City locations of dine-in theater Alamo Drafthouse are calling on the business to stop screenings of a film about the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics that they are calling “Zionist propaganda.”
The petition, which has collected nearly 1,000 signatures, posted Jan. 1 to the NYC Alamo United union’s Instagram account, states that the Downtown Brooklyn location was only supposed to host a “one-off private screening” of Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 on Nov. 22, 2024, and that, after employees expressed their outrage, management assured them there would be no further screenings. (NYC Alamo United could not be reached for comment on Instagram or X; Alamo Drafthouse did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“Last minute, it was quietly added to our schedule,” the petition said. “Sony-owned Alamo would rather make a quick buck off the plight of Palestinians than listen to their workers, urging them to ‘Give a Shit’ about anything besides the size of their coffers.”
The employees described the film, which was nominated for a Golden Globe award, and follows the ABC sports teams’ live coverage of the unfolding hostage crisis in the Olympic village “an ahistorical and dehumanizing dramatization of Operation Iqrit and Biram” orchestrated by Black September. Black September was a militant breakaway group of the Palestinian political group Fatah; on Septe. 5, 1972, it killed 11 Israelis, including athletes and coaches, after demanding Israeli return over 200 Palestinian prisoners.
The petition, signed “101 members of the NYC Alamo United,” takes issue with the characters in the newsroom, played by actors including John Magaro and Peter Sarsgaard, “not hesitating to call the militants ‘terrorists’ and ‘A-rabs.’” (In the film, ABC correspondent Peter Jennings cautions the team from using the word “terrorists” — the man who derisively refers to Black September as “A-rabs” is called out by an Algerian colleague.)
The Alamo petition contextualizes the hostage situation by saying it came “a mere five years after the Six Day War,” which led to the Israeli occupation and 25 years after the Nakba (“catastrophe”), the word Palestinians use for mass displacement after the founding of Israel in 1948. The petition doesn’t at any point state the specifics of Black September’s operation or the bloody outcome, but called the Israeli hunt for the culprits as a “wanton assassination of Palestinian activists.”
Characterizing the film as “yet another attempt by the Western media to push its imperialist and racist agenda, manufacturing consent for the continued genocide and cultural decimation of Palestine and its peoples,” the petition writers accused it of “quintessential Orientalism” for its depiction of Arabs and brown people as “evil, antisemitic terrorists.”
Fehlbaum’s film’s depictions of Black September are dictated by the actual television footage of the day. The film almost never leaves the studio, and every image of both the Israelis and the Palestinians is taken from the ABC broadcast.
In the petition, the union said it condemned “the Alamo’s willingness to profit off the genocide in Palestine” and called on others to demand “they immediately stop platforming film and media industry companies that spread genocidal rhetoric” and that the petition would be presented during the union’s bargaining session this month. Many of the names on the petition are not full names.
In an interview with the Forward in November, Fehlbaum, a Germany-based director from Switzerland, said that the film was not meant to comment on the current war in Gaza, but “a very specific moment in history and in media history,” where live broadcasts of tragedies, and 24 hour news cycles, began.
“What we hope is that we can provide a way for the audience to engage with questions about our complex media environment through that historical lens,” he said.
The current Alamo Drafthouse website says September 5 is screening until Jan. 15 at the Downtown Brooklyn location. The site’s description says the film “provides a fresh perspective on the live broadcast seen globally by an estimated one billion people at the time.”
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