‘This is our story and we’re keeping it,’ the president of ABC Sports declares after he’s asked to hand coverage of the Munich Olympics terrorist attack over to the network’s news unit. Warned that they are out of their depth, the team’s close proximity on the ground ultimately wins out, with their work setting a benchmark for reporting of such tragedies.

The Swiss filmmaker Tim Fehlbaum (Tides) takes a well-explored event and finds a fresh angle, fashioning an intimate, economical and extraordinarily engrossing drama about going where no journalists have gone before that’s been nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Incorporating extensive archive footage of events into proceedings, the film shadows ABC’s sports crew in Munich as they cover the 1972 Summer Olympics, before all hell breaks loose when members of the Israeli team are taken hostage by Palestinian militants Black September.

The team innovate on the fly to follow the story ‘wherever it takes us.’ In their efforts, they’re guided by their president Roone Arledge (the ever-excellent Peter Sarsgaard), with John Magaro from Past Lives leading the control room, and Leonie Benesch (The Teachers’ Lounge) playing a brave and indispensable German translator. Although September 5 highlights German nervousness about the fact that those captured were Jewish, it largely avoids discussion of the more sensitive Israeli-Palestinian politics.

Instead, we see the team agonising over split-second decisions, their compassion for the hostages, the threat their presence poses to haphazard rescue operations, and how they wrestle with the morality of this new style of reporting that they’re inadvertently pioneering. The cast are sublime and Fehlbaum’s decision to confine the action to ABC’s Munich headquarters is inspired, with tight framing ratcheting up tension as it places us firmly in the participants’ stressed-out shoes.

September 5 is in cinemas from Thursday 6 February.