Film Screening | Punishment Park (Althea Thauberger Selects)

ADMISSION
$0 – $15

In person at the Cinematheque
Registration required
Tickets here

Join us for a special screening of Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971), selected by artist and academic, Althea Thauberger.

Punishment Park is the only project British filmmaker Peter Watkins made in the United States. It is a pseudo-documentary that imagines President Richard Nixon employing an actual state of emergency bill (the McCarran Internal Security Act, 1950) to extrajudicially interrogate and detain dissidents. Detained hippies, activists, and conscientious objectors are given the choice of prolonged sentences in overcrowded prisons, or three days in ​“Punishment Park,” a desert survival course doubling as a training ground for the National Guard. Building on the faux verité methods Watkins previously developed in 1964’s Culloden (a reenactment of the 1746 battle) and 1965’s The War Game (an alternate history of a nuclear attack on the UK that was banned after initial screenings), Punishment Park borrows from the forms and semantics of television and the nascent embedded war-reporting forms associated with the Vietnam War, and was effectively banned in the US for decades. Working with non-actors who are ideologically aligned with the characters they depict, the film walks a tightrope between fiction and reality, and is exemplary of Watkins’s situational filmmaking. —Althea Thauberger

Punishment Park will be introduced by artist Althea Thauberger.

Presented in partnership with the Cinematheque and sponsored by Downtown Van.

If you would like to make a donation to support Capture Photography Festival, please donate via Charitable Impact here. Amounts greater than $20.00 will receive a tax receipt.

Althea Thauberger is an artist, filmmaker, and educator known for place-based experimental documentary projects that emerge from collaborative research and production processes. Her work—spanning photography, film, video, and performance—explores relationships between community stories and geopolitical histories. She was born in Saskatoon and is of settler Scandinavian and Black Sea German descent. 

Thauberger’s recent exhibitions include the Remai Modern (2025), the Kaunas Biennial (2021); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2020); the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019); the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2019); the National Gallery of Canada (2019); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017); and the inaugural Karachi Biennale (2017).