Northwest Film Forum

Thomas Jefferson once posited: “The tree of liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.” In light of recent political maneuvering, there’s no better time than this Independence Day to reexamine the controversial, uncompromising Punishment Park. 

 

Peter Watkins is a filmmaker who has spent his entire career investigating the borderland between documentary and fiction. Punishment Park was inspired largely by the McCarran Act, which granted summary-judgment powers to the president in times of potential insurrection. Central to the film is a nightmarish scenario only one step removed from reality: young radicals arrested for their political activities are given a choice between incarceration and participation in a potentially deadly ‘game’ which finds them racing across a punishing desert landscape with armed law enforcement officers in pursuit. Part dystopian nightmare, part prism through which the profound tensions and frustrations in American society in the late 1960s are made manifest, the film remains a fascinating reflection of a fractured America.

 

“Punishment Park is one of the most incendiary documents of radicalism ever made. Watching it now, it's hard not to think of the decision to declare the captives at Guantanamo Bay 'unlawful combatants' so as to exempt them from the Geneva Convention." —Eye Weekly