The 2024 Philadelphia Film Festival presents Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 and Sean Baker's Anora

September 5

The festival opened on Thursday night with September 5, a nearly real-time depiction of how a team from ABC Sports covered the hostage-taking, and eventual murder, of the Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

We see the ABC News control room, as they cover the story over about 24 hours, led by Peter Sarsgaard as legendary ABC Sports boss Roone Arledge (more than 20 years after Sarsgaard played an editor in Shattered Glass). John Magaro plays young, untested producer Geoffrey Mason, while Ben Chaplin is veteran Marvin Bader and Leonie Benesch (from 2023 PFF film The Teacher’s Lounge) is German translator Marianne Gebhardt. Jim McKay and Peter Jennings are mostly portrayed through archival footage.

The MVP of the film is Chaplin, the British actor who, almost 30 years ago, was the dreamboat opposite Uma Thurman and Jeneane Garofolo in The Truth About Cats and Dogs, and later had parts in several of Terrence Malick’s films. He plays Bader, the Jewish member of the crew, who’s clearly affected by the events but doesn’t need to verbalize it.

Impressive tension for a well-known story

I know this story pretty well, there were a few key moments that I knew were coming that I knew the movie had to nail. And it does. And even more impressive than that, the film manages to keep the tension up for 90 minutes, even if you know going in exactly how it turned out.

The film also gets a great deal of mileage out of the vintage technology, yielding dramatic tension out of everything from negotiations for the use of a satellite to the length of time it takes to dial a rotary phone.

Quite a few things are going on in the background, from the fraught history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to this all taking place, in Germany, just 27 years after the liberation of the camps. There’s also the incompetence of the German authorities, ABC Sports’ fights with other networks over satellite usage, and Arledge fighting off attempts by ABC News to take over the coverage.

Worth the wait

This film is going to run into the buzzsaw of Israel/Palestine discourse, as did its obvious companion piece, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 Munich. The Spielberg film was more about the aftermath of Munich than the attack itself, but treated the issue with empathy and nuance—which, naturally, got it accused of being both too pro-Israel and too anti-Israel.

September 5 spends less time on the background because the film is about something very specific. I’m sure it could have stopped dead in its tracks for 10 minutes so the characters could argue about whether Black September was “misunderstood”, but it’s not that kind of movie, and it wouldn’t have been true to what the film is trying to accomplish.

The opening-night showing of September 5 got underway more than an hour late, due to some type of snafu involving the digital file download, which is how most movies are exhibited these days. The film, however, was more than worth the wait.

Anora

Such a file mishap was not possible the following night, because Sean Baker’s Anora, which screened as a centerpiece, was projected in 35mm, part of a welcome new trend for Film Society screenings of NEON. Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival—the first American film to win at Cannes in 13 years—sent audiences home satisfied.

Baker, whose recent films have all been part of PFF, and also were part of a monthlong retrospective at the Film Society in October, specializes in very stylized stories from the margins of Americana, usually centered on sex workers. This one is a riff on Cinderella, set in New York City, among various immigrants from the former Soviet Union, mostly Russia and Armenia. Think of it as Pretty Woman, if the Richard Gere character had been a 21-year-old drunken idiot.

The film stars Mikey Madison as Ani, a stripper based somewhere in the Coney Island/Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. At her club, she meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the 20-ish, party-boy scion of a Russian oligarch family. The two embark on a whirlwind romance and soon elope in Vegas, leading to vengeance from the family’s spectacularly incompetent henchmen.

Each of these henchmen emerges as a full character, led by Toros (Karren Karagulian), who somehow is both a Russian Orthodox clergyman, and also a fixer/enforcer. Vache Tovmasyan is Garnick, while Yura Borisov is Igor, both of whom manage to be outsmarted and out-toughed by a young stripper who’s much smaller than they are.

Well-chosen openers

The film’s best stretch has the other characters searching Brooklyn for Ivan, all giving Baker chances to light that part of Brooklyn beautifully, especially the Coney Island boardwalk in winter.

Madison, in this lead role, is an undeniable star. She was on Pamela Adlon’s great show Better Things and played one of the Manson girls in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (it seems every actor with a small part in that 2019 film has since become a huge star). While I’ll be clear that Anora is very different from Pretty Woman, I could see Madison going on a star run comparable to the one Julia Roberts had in the ’90s.

Expect to hear a great deal more about both of these films, which were well-chosen for the opening days of this year’s Philadelphia Film Festival. Anora opens in wide release on November 1. September 5 will be released on November 29. Visit the Philly Film Festival online to check out the rest of this year’s lineup.