Synopsis:

The Journey: A Film for Peace, made between 1984 and 1987, is a pioneering attempt at a fully international cinema, monumental both in its critique and analysis and in its effort to inspire new ways of using information and the media. Watkins worked with support groups around the world to raise money and assemble crews while shooting the film in the United States, Canada, Norway, Scotland, France, West Germany, Mozambique, Japan, Australia, Tahiti, and Mexico. He spent eighteen months editing the more than 100 hours of footage into fifteen separate chapters, interlacing together extended family interviews, documentation of the global arms race, recollections of survivors of the bombings in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Hamburg, community psychodramas of possible disaster scenarios, and works by other artists. The film is largely a challenge to the mass media for its part in the escalation of the arms race and the withholding of information on the effects of nuclear weapons, but also provides a wealth of specific information about many other contemporary issues: military expenditures, world hunger, the environment, gender politics, the relationship between a violent past and the present, and, especially, the role of the media and of modern educational systems with regard to international issues. The carefully composed juxtapositions of visual and sound motifs produce a powerful experience; a cinematic space is created which chips away at the separation that tends to exist between ourselves and the suffering of others. Our consciousness is transported around the earth as we encounter the particularities of specific families and places, each detail implying the broader global context within which it has meaning. This film has just as much relevance to the global issues of today and the nature of our attitudes towards them, as it did nearly two decades ago.