Evening Land by Peter Watkins

Sunday 27th March 2011, 6pm
at Colorama
52-56 Lancaster Street,
London SE1




Evening Land
by Peter Watkins, 1976 (Denmark 110 mins)

Made with a cast of 192 non-professional actors, Evening Land continues to explore the form of fictional documentary which Watkins had developed since Culloden (1964), intervening polemically into a period of intense debates about the media, worker militancy, terrorism and the anti-nuclear movement.

‘Evening Land’ depicts ‘fictional’ events in Europe at that time - beginning with a strike at a shipyard in Copenhagen over the building of four submarines for the French navy: not only because the financially troubled management has proposed a wage freeze to secure the contract, but because it is discovered that the vessels can be fitted with nuclear missiles. At the same time, a summit meeting of European Common Market ministers takes place in Copenhagen, and a group of radical demonstrators kidnap the Danish EEC Minister in protest against the production of nuclear submarines in Denmark, and in support of the strikers’ demands. The Danish police not only brutally attack a demonstration by the strikers, they also locate and rescue the kidnapped minister, and capture or kill the ‘terrorists’.




Essay: http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/evening.htm