Docu-drama ‘7 Days in Entebbe’ is not just another hijacking film

In the riveting new thriller 7 Days in Entebbe, now showing in cinemas in South Africa and starring Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) and Daniel Brühl (Inglourious Basterds), a shocking act of terrorism in the summer of 1976 leads to one of the most daring hostage rescue missions yet.

An Air France jet travelling from Tel Aviv to Paris is taken over in midair by four hijackers: two Palestinians and two left-wing German radicals. When the plane is diverted to an abandoned terminal at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, the terrified passengers become bargaining chips in a deadly political standoff.

As the likelihood of finding a diplomatic solution fades, the Israeli government sets in motion an extraordinary plan to free the prisoners before time runs out.

Combining vivid historical details with pulse-quickening suspense, 7 Days in Entebbe is a powerful depiction of an international crisis that stunned the world.

Brühl and Pike play the roles of the two hijackers – the leftist German radicals sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. The other two hijackers are Palestinian members of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations.

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) receives word of the hijacking, he and Defence Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) debate what Israel’s response should be to the hijackers’ demands.

Rabin authorises a daring rescue mission dubbed “Operation Thunderbolt”, an audacious plan that requires split-second timing, the element of surprise, and cooperation from a neighbouring country.

Says Brühl in an interview with Empire Entertainment: “It’s not a black-and-white version in which heroic soldiers fight the cold-blooded terrorist monsters. I was attracted by the multi-perspectives on that event and on that operation. All these different voices are heard and that is necessary in a conflict that is as complex as this one. And also the interest of José Padilha [who directed the film] in finding the human beings behind the façade of a terrorist – to understand the motivations and what drives them.”

Padilha, who is best known for directing the 2014 Robocop movie and Narcos, says the script appealed to him because it opened up the story to dimensions that had not been explored before. This latest screenplay, written by Gregory Burke, is the fifth film to dramatise the events of Operation Thunderbolt and it doesn’t approach it from a military perspective; instead, it looks at it from the hostages’ point of view and their interaction with the hijackers.

“You have to establish what the character wants and what stops him from getting what he wants. That’s what generates drama,” says Padilha in another interview with Empire Entertainment. “So I looked at what the Palestinian terrorists want and I let them spell out their reasons for doing it. And some of them had very personal reasons – some of the soldiers had lost relatives to the Israeli military.

“And then I looked at the Germans, who have ideological reasons for doing it; they are Marxists and they are in opposition to Nazis in the history of Germany.”

Padilha says he also looked at Peres’s reluctance to negotiate and the political constraints he had to face, and Rabin’s considerations. It is then possible to have empathy for the characters and their internal logic. “The drama exists because each of those internal logics contradict each other.”

The story’s complex and often contradictory notion of heroism is another aspect explored in the film. “Everybody involved in the event wanted to be the good guy,” says screenwriter Burke. “Böse and Brigitte want to be heroes. The Palestinians want to be heroes. The soldiers on the rescue mission want to be heroes. The politicians want to be heroes.”

He adds: “Reading this in historian Prof Saul [David]’s book Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport led Burke to think about the hijackers, their different motivations, and how the hostages managed to make some of them question the premises of what they were doing. Was it the case that, at least in part, the military success achieved on Entebbe was due to the hostages themselves? That, to me, sounded like an interesting subject to explore.”

The construction of some of the characters, says Burke, in particular that of Böse, Brigitte, Jabber and Lemoine, is meant to stimulate debate around those questions.

“When this film first came to me, my natural inclination wasn’t to do another hijacking movie,” says Kate Solomon, who produced the film alongside Tim Bevan. “This is ultimately a story about conflict. International and political conflict. Conflict between the hijackers and the passengers. Conflict between the German hijackers and the Palestinian hijackers. And within each conflict there’s something surprising going on.”

This article was paid for by Empire Entertainment.