We are pleased to reprise Peter Watkins's timely The Journey, on the occasion of its acquisition in the PFA Collection. Watkins creates compassionate, uncompromising films that challenge notions of history and media. His faux documentary The Commune (Paris, 1871) showed at PFA in 2002. “The Journey (is) perhaps his greatest achievement. Watkins's intelligence, passion, and skill have been consistently masked by controversy: he is the most neglected and perhaps the most significant major British director of his generation” (Sean Cubit).
“Years in the making, this monumental film dedicated to peace was a pioneering attempt at a fully international cinema. Producer-director Watkins worked with support groups in nations around the world, raising money and assembling casts and crews. During 1984 and 1985 the film was shot in the United States, Canada, Norway, Scotland, France, West Germany, Mozambique, Japan, Australia, Tahiti, and Mexico. Watkins talks with families and citizen groups in these nations about the network of social and political issues we are all part of-especially about the world arms race and its relationship to world hunger, gender politics, and the functioning of the mass media. Survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Hamburg reminisce about their experiences, and groups of people psychodramatize scenarios the threat of a third world war might necessitate. Most important, however, as The Journey develops, the people Watkins works with begin to explore possibilities for moving through the barriers that separate peoples, toward a more peaceful, synergistic world. The Journey is a fourteen and a half hour film, divided into nineteen sections. It can be (experienced) as a whole or in sections.”