Peter Watkins Trailers
The War Game at Cinecity TrailerPeter Watkins and the Playcraft Film Unit TrailerMaking Reel History Trailer
Peter Watkins (29 October 1935 – 30 October 2025) was an English filmmaker, documentarian, writer and film theorist. He is known as a pioneer of the docudrama and the mockumentary genres, typically with heavy political content. His films present pacifist and radical ideas in a nontraditional style. He mainly concentrated his works and ideas around the mass media and viewers' relation/participation to a movie or television documentary.
Nearly all of Watkins' films have used a combination of dramatic and documentary elements to dissect historical occurrences or possible near future events. The first of these, Culloden, portrayed the Jacobite uprising of 1745 in a documentary style, as if television reporters were interviewing the participants and accompanying them into battle; a similar device was used in his biographical film Edvard Munch. La Commune (Paris, 1871) reenacts the Paris Commune days using a large cast of French non-actors.
In 2004 he also wrote a book, Media Crisis, an engaged essay about the media crisis, the monoform and, foremost, the lack of debate around the construction of new forms of audiovisual media.
Most Popular Peter Watkins Trailers
Total trailers found: 24
01 October 1971
In this fictional documentary, U.S. prisons are at capacity, and President Nixon declares a state of emergency.
12 November 1974
Edvard Munch's childhood is overshadowed by death: he suffers the loss of his sister and mother, while enduring serious illness himself, almost dying.
03 July 2003
In 1871, a journalist for Versailles Television broadcasts a soothing and official view of events while a Commune television is set up to provide the perspectives of the Paris rebels.
03 September 1994
The film portrays the Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter August Strindberg's life 1849-1912.
13 April 1966
A hypothetical Chinese invasion of South Vietnam triggers a new world war between East and West. In Rochester, Kent, the anticipation of a nuclear attack leads to mass evacuations.
11 April 2012
Set in the underground living quarters of a scientist working at an international nuclear waste station near the west coast of Sweden.
25 June 1969
Some time in the future, East and West have stopped maintaining standing armies and nuclear weapons. Instead, to settle their differences they pit different teams of crack combat specialists against each other.
15 December 1964
Culloden, Scottish Highlands, April 16th, 1746. It was one of the most mishandled and brutal battles ever fought in Great Britain.
28 February 1967
Britain's biggest pop singer, Steven Shorter, receives unwavering adulation and possesses total control over his rabid fans, which includes nearly the entire population.
31 December 1991
A group of people working in film and television are gathered at a dinner party to discuss Australian media coverage of the Gulf War.
01 January 1956
A reconstruction of the Allied landing in occupied France during the Second World War.
02 January 1959
A short story narrated by an unknown British soldier who reveals his hopes, fears, and disillusionment while heading into battle against the German army.
03 July 2006
Peter Watkins recounts the short-lived, happy period making his classic documentary Culloden and discusses, as he sees it, the tragic decline television has taken since it was made.
01 September 1961
“The Forgotten Faces (1961), a film reconstruction of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, won Watkins another amateur Oscar, and to this day, the film is praised in England as "one of the most memorable amateur films ever made".
24 February 1987
Peter Watkins' global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it, as well as a meditation on the inherent bias of the media, and documentaries themselves.
24 September 1975
The Seventies People is a 1975 television docu-drama that was produced by Danmarks Radio. The film explores the high suicide rate in Denmark, the many factors behind it and how the average citizen deals with the stress of life, work, school and family.
07 July 2026
When Peter Watkins’ banned nuclear war masterpiece "The War Game" reached Toronto in 1967, it found an unlikely home at Cinecity, a new cinema determined to challenge audiences.
07 September 2001
This feature documentary is a portrait of Peter Watkins, an Oscar®-winning British filmmaker who, for the past 4 decades, has proved that films can be made without compromise.
12 May 1966
World War II, 1940. When the Nazi hordes invade and occupy Great Britain, the English citizens are soon divided between those who choose to submissively collaborate and those who are willing to fight.
15 November 2017
The documentary, 'Peter Watkins and the Playcraft Film Unit' (2017) by Tim Jones focuses upon the five amateur films produced between 1957 and 1962 by Peter Watkins and Playcraft, a Canterbury-based amateur drama group.
21 February 1977
Denmark is in deep crisis: the country is hit by general strike, during the holding of a NATO summit in Copenhagen.
01 January 2004
An introductory video to Punishment Park featuring Peter Watkins.
01 January 2003
The Role of a Lifetime raises questions about the ethical and social responsibilities of the artist and about the relationship between cinematic representation and historical record.
01 January 1963
This 1963 film from the Central Office of Information looks at air traffic controllers in the control rooms at Prestwick and London airports.
