Screening Date: 15 February 2026, Sunday, 2:00 pm / 7 March 2026, Saturday 2:00 pm

Director: Peter Watkins

Screenplay: Agathe Bluysen, Peter Watkins

Cast: Véronique Couzon, Armelle Hounkanin, Marie-Josephe Barrere

France / 1999 / 345 min. / Black and White / French / Turkish Subtitles

La Commune (Paris, 1871) is Peter Watkins’s last film. It represents the culmination of both his years-long development of collective film production and his political interventions challenging the notion that history unfolds in a single time and place.

Watkins reflects the weeks of 1871 in Paris, when the people took control of the government and demands for gender, income, and class equality, as well as the dream of creating a just world, became concrete, by allowing amateur actors to conduct their own research in a factory just outside Paris. He conveys the events through both the press established by the people themselves and the state-aligned media, without denying the presence of the camera.

In 1871, Watkins finds traces of all the rebellions, demands for rights, and state massacres in history. Like every character in the film, the voice of a young female teacher who conveys the necessity of secular education to the camera is not confined to 1871 or Paris. Through the film’s unusual production method, Watkins shatters the idea of the creative director who conveys his vision.

To quote Peter Watkins himself from his introduction of the film for retrospective for Madrid in 2018:

“Why this film at this time? We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history — where the conjunction of post-modernist cynicism, sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalisation, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualisation of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered ‘old fashioned’. Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm — to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia — which we now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.”

* The film is going to be screened in two parts. There are going to be 10-minute intermissions during and between both sections. A total of three breaks are going to take place throughout the screening.

*The copy of the film is obtained from Peter Watkins’ personal archive.