Director

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  Peter Watkins

  La Commune de Paris (1999)The Freethinker (1992-94) The Journey (1983-86) Evening Land (1976) The Trap (1975) Punishment Park takes place tomorrow, yesterday or five years from now. It is also happening today. The war in Indo-China has continued to widen. The administration in America has enlarged its call for the draft. There is a corresponding up-surge of massed demonstrations, bombings of draft centres, and other acts of 'sabotage'. Many of the campuses are at a stand-still. Due to the large numbers of 'political criminals'created by this situation, penal institutions throughout the country become vastly over-crowded. The President therefore uses the powers granted to him under Title II of the 1950 Internal Security Act (the McCarran Act) to declare an 'event of insurrection' within the United States and sets up a series of detention camps throughout the country. Those detained at these camps—mostly young men and women - brought before quasi-judicial tribunals and convicted of various 'conspiracy' charges, of which 'guilt' is already assumed. The defendants are given a choice: either to serve their penal sentence in a Federal prison, or to undergo three days ordeal in the 'Punishment Park' adjoining the detention camp. This ordeal - a three-day pursuit across fifty miles of desert, on foot, without water— is described as "a 'punitive deterrent'... for those elements seeking the violent overthrow of the United States Government." The pursuit force consists of various selected units of police and National Guard, offering what the administration sums up as 'a necessary training...' The defendants are informed that if they complete their ordeal without capture, they will have fulfilled their obligations. If they do not, they must serve their full penal sentence. Punishment Park is an allegory, in the form of a documentary. Structurally, the film is an interweaving of two situations. A British documentary film-unit follows group #657 through their three-day ordeal in the Bear Mountain National Punishment Park near Los Angeles, California. Through a series of interviews with law enforcement officers and 'offenders' and through the actual happenings that are depicted throughout the ordeal, the reality is extended beyond the boundaries of the park to reflect the attitudes and feelings in America generally. The second situation is the documentary coverage of each of seven defendants, five men and two women, confronting the members of the tribunal affiliated with the Bear Mountain Punishment Park. All the defendants have been previously tried and found guilty of conspiring to forcefully overthrow the government. The task before the tribunal members is to assess the degree of guilt and to pass sentence accordingly. The tribunal members include a housewife (and draft-board member), a Senator, a Doctor of Sociology, a manufacturing executive (and draft-board member), a journalist, and a labor union official. Also present is an attorney and a member of the F.B.I.. We hope that Punishment Park will be seen as a film that deals with problems broader even than the present crisis in America. We hope that, in the faces of the American law-officers, the militant defendants and the tribunal, may be seen some of the severe stresses which face contemporary society everywhere, throughout the world, and which are pushing many of us further and further towards fear and intolerance - even violence and repression—as being the only way of 'handling' these problems.​​