Peter Watkins retrospective  

 A fictional-documentary depicting Denmark in deep crisis: the country is hit by general strike, during the holding of a NATO summit in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, a minister is kidnapped by extremists and state power cracks down against the politically active leftists. Made with a cast of 192 non-professional actors, the film intervenes polemically into a period of intense debates about the media, worker militancy, terrorism and the anti-nuclear movement.

Peter Watkins

Active between the mid 1950s and the 1990s, granted with an Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1966 with The War Game, Peter Watkins is a docudrama and false documentary pioneer. He graduated from Cambridge University and London Academy of Dramatic Arts and worked in advertisement industry before starting to direct. His films investigate the current political conjuncture through contemporary or historical settings, and critically address the limits and possibilities of the documentary form. At the heart of Watkins’ work lies the criticism to audiovisual media as an instrument of power and our relation and participation to a film or television documentary. The director used to live and create in Vilnius, however at the moment he resides in France.

Filmography

La Commune (Paris, 1871), 2000

The Freethinker, 1992–1994

The Journey, 1987

Evening Land / Aftonlandet, 1977

The Trap / Fallan, 1975

The Seventies People, 1974

Edvard Munch, 1973

Punishment Park, 1971

The Gladiators (The Peace Game), 1968

Privilege, 1966

The War Game, 1965

Culloden, 1964

The Forgotten Faces, 1960

Diary of an Unknown Soldier, 1959