Peter Watkins

Using the "You Are There" approach of earlier radio and TV days, Watkins has a male and female news team from "Commune TV" wandering through the poorest district of Paris inviting people to express their grievances against the state to the camera. While the people bitterly suffer because of the government's inept defeat at the hands of the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War, their anger inspires solidarity for them throughout Paris, and although they briefly rise up and seize power, they are brutally put down in the end. (IMDB Comments)

In a desert zone in southwest California, a civilian tribunal passes sentence on groups of dissidents and gives them the option of participating in law enforcement training exercises in the Bear Mountain National Punishment Park.

Positing itself as a live documentary filmed between 1884-1894, director Peter Watkins' experimental biography of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch(played by Geir Westby) is an angst-ridden glimpse into the traumatic political and social conditions that birthed Munch's invention of Expressionism. Tracing Munch's rise to infamy, the film begins in Victorian-era Christiania (Oslo), where Munch spent his formative years with a family plagued by disease...

Steven Shorter is the ultimate British music star. His music is listened to by everyone from pre-teens to grandparents. He has no trace of public bad habits or drug involvement.

A fictional, worst-case-scenario docu-drama about nuclear war and its aftermath in and around a typical English city. Although it won an Oscar for Best Documentary, it is fiction.

Some time in the future, East and West have stopped maintaining standing armies and nuclear weapons. Instead, to settle their differences they pit different teams of crack combat specialists against each other. (imdb)

A reconstruction of the Battle of Culloden, the last battle to take place on British soil, as if modern TV cameras were present. (imdb)

In this faux documentary the workers of a Danish shipyard go on strike when they are supposed to assist in the building of an European U-boat fleet and kick off a chain of events that puts the government in distress. After a group of leftist militants kidnap a high ranking politician Denmark drowns in state-run terror.

A WWI english soldier narrates his final days of being alive, ponders about the morality of war and trying to survive another day. (imdb)

Acclaimed British filmmaker Peter Watkins collaborates with twenty-four students from the Swedish Folk High School in Biskops-Arno to craft this highly unconventional look at the life of controversial 19th Century dramatist August Stindberg. (allmovie.com)

A film reconstruction of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. (pwatkins.mnsi.net)

A film that criticises and discusses the Australian media coverage of the first gulf war. (imdb)

A global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it.

The Seventies Folk is a 1975 television docu-drama written and directed by Peter Watkins that was produced by Dansmark Radio. The tele-film explores the high suicide rate in Denmark, the many factors behind it and how the average citizen deals with the stress of life, work, school and family.

In the year 1999, totalitarianism prevails with the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. colluding to govern the world by strict rules. Chaos erupts on the surface but state employees live safely underground. A radical and his son, visit his brother John's family in the bunkers and the discourse grows hot. (imdb)