The Vietnam War is still raging. President Nixon enacts the McCarran Act, allowing him to round up and arrest political dissidents. Once arrested the prisoners are given the option to either serve jail time or participate in a perverse game of capture the flag in a “punishment park”, where they have 3 days to get across 50 miles to an American flag. If they manage to do this they will be let free. Two documentary film crews, from England and West Germany, have been given access to film one group’s attempt at making through one of the parks. 

English writer/director Peter Watkins coincidentally found himself in America when the Kent State shootings occurred. Finding inspiration in the political protest movements happening at the time he wrote the concept of Punishment Park and hired non-professional actors to stage one of the most powerful pseudo-documentaries ever made.

Set in a uchronic America, Watkins simply asked “What could it look like if the President of the US decided to round up his political enemies?” Equally an exploitation movie as it is a serious examination of social politics, the documentary style makes us forget that this isn’t actually happening. Filmed in the Mojave Desert, Punishment Park blended scripted narrative with improvisational acting and cinema verite filmmaking to create a psychodrama so real that violence actually erupted on set between cast members. He used actual leftist protesters and Silent Generation conservatives to play heightened versions of themselves, leading to actual arguments and at one point the “protesters” throwing rocks at the “national guard” and them actually firing back unprompted. In true Watkins fashion, he kept the footage in the film.

More sober than cynical, Punishment Park is a thought exercise/social experiment put to celluloid. Watkins understood that America was at a cultural and political crossroads and as a foreigner he had an outsider’s perspective. He saw that the US government was moving increasingly to the right and used cinema to explore how this Overton Window shift would manifest itself as policy. On its release the film was criticized for being nihilistic, propagandistic, and too outlandish too take seriously. 

But here in 2026 we have the President of the United specifically naming “anti-fascists” as one of the three major types of terror groups the US government is facing and that they will “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist” in the official United States Counterterrorism Strategy policy document. The idea that the US government would hunt and kill its own citizens for political reasons may have seemed a bridge too far to mainstream America in 1971, but when Donald Trump ended the Presidential Forward to his new policy document in May 2026 with “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You” it became very clear that Peter Watkins was a cinematic Cassandra all along.