Synopsis:

A little seen but devastating film, it was released briefly in the early seventies to polarised reviews and was subsequently suppressed for nearly thirty-five years. Like the War Game, it is a pseudo-documentary, this time set in the US during the height of the Vietnam War. Taking as its premise the activation of the 1950 Internal Security Act by President Nixon, authorizing Federal authorities to detain without bail persons judged "risk to internal security", it follows two groups of detainees, paralleling both their stories in a dreadfully believable narrative.

At the film's opening, Group 637 find themselves in Bear Mountain Punishment Park in the Californian desert, about to begin a 'game' of cat and mouse: running from law enforcement officers for three days in scorching temperatures. If they win, they are told, they are free to go. If they are caught by the officers, then they must peacefully surrender and serve out the prison sentences they were originally given. Not far away, Group 638 is being tried by a civilian tribunal, edging towards the same fate as their peers. Both groups consist largely of conscientious objectors and radicals (the group in the tribunal contains a popular folk singer, a radical black poet, and a student organiser among others) and both narratives stand alone as eerily plausible actions of a paranoid state at war. It's in the weaving together of both strands, however, that the full horror of what Watkins is portraying hits home.

Each member of the group at tribunal is questioned individually, and their interrogations express the political arguments at the centre of the film: the young folk singer who argues with the housewife representative on the tribunal, rising to an hysterical pitch about the susceptibility of youth for instance, or the young black man who refuses to be silenced and is brutally restrained and gagged by the armed guards. By the time they are sentenced, and offered the choice of long detentions or a spell at Punishment Park, we have witnessed the fate of the previous group and can only watch with an excruciating sense of the inevitable as they each choose Punishment Park. The discomfort of watching this film cannot be over-emphasised, and its impact is only weakened by the escalating hysteria of the climax, where the BBC voice of the filmmaker questioning the participants from behind the camera moves from authoritative to shrill. Shot by Joan Churchill, Nick Broomfield collaborator and award-winning exponent of observational cinema, its documentary credentials are constantly emphasised to hammer home the stark plausibility of a nation descending into an authoritarian state. Its poignancy would not go unnoticed by a contemporary audience familiar with the outrage of Guantanamo Bay.