Synopsis
Punishment Park (1971) is a political mockumentary you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by British filmmaker Peter Watkins at the height of the Vietnam War. The film imagines a near-future America where overflowing prisons push Nixon's government to a grim innovation: antiwar protesters, draft resisters, and folk singers go before a tribunal, then face a choice — serve their sentence or spend three days running across a California desert while federal officers hunt them down in a live training exercise.
Watkins shot the whole thing hand-held and unscripted, with real actors improvising arguments directly into the camera. The tribunal scenes play like a collision between two countries that happen to share a language — the older generation and the younger one talk past each other completely, and neither side comes out clean. The police pursuit footage is deliberately ugly in the way news footage is ugly.
No American TV network would touch it when it came out. Decades later it still lands like a provocation rather than a period piece. Stream Punishment Park (1971) online on iFILM.
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