In a series of interviews with ordinary people, Peter Watkins’ 14½ hour film “traces the systemic impact of the global nuclear regime across 12 countries, building an intricate series of connections between the state of the arms trade, military expenditure, the environment and gender politics that are more relevant than ever.” - Tate Modern; www.tate.org.uk; viewed 23/06/2014.
THE JOURNEY - ‘RESAN’ in Swedish - was “produced in 1983-86 by the Swedish Peace & Arbitration Society and local support groups in Sweden, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, USSR, Mexico, Japan, Scotland, Polynesia, Mozambique, Denmark, France, Norway, West Germany, with post-production support from the National Film Board in Montreal, Canada” - Peter Watkins; http://pwatkins.mnsi.net; viewed 23/06/2014.
New Zealand support came from the NZ Foundation For Peace Studies in Auckland. The finished film has been used “in various ways; both during and after school hours at a high school in Motueka, a continuing education course in Auckland, a Canterbury University Peace Studies project, a meeting in Golden Bay, and elsewhere.” - ibid.
“Most cinema is predicated on the not unattractive belief that the movie experience should be pleasant, undemanding and over as quickly as possible. But sometimes, just sometimes, the more effort you put into a film, the more you get out of it. Peter Watkins is celebrated for his groundbreaking BBC films The War Game and Culloden. Since then he's made half a dozen features in Scandinavia, North America and France, some quite brilliant, though none widely seen. Radical in form and content, his work has been shunned by broadcasters and distributors alike. Commissioned by the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society to make a global peace film in 1983, Watkins shot more than 100 hours of footage, most of it conversations with ordinary people. He cut the film into 19 units, each lasting up to 45 minutes (a lesson period in Sweden), with a view to making it available to schools. But, with only a few exceptions, schools haven't shown the film, and nor has anyone else ... Completed [...] just before the Berlin Wall came down, it's as relevant as you like. And it might even change your life.” - Tom Charity, ‘Time Out’ magazine; www.timeout.com/london/film/the-journey; viewed 23/06/2014.
“In the wake of the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant [in] 2011, the critical relevance of THE JOURNEY can be neither doubted nor overlooked.” - London’s Tate Modern (promoting their screening, over three days, punctuated with debates, in May 2013); www.tate.org.uk; viewed 23/06/2014.