Screening Date: 7 April 2026, Tuesday, 8:00 pm

The Web

Director: Peter Watkins

Screenplay:  Peter Watkins

Cast: Michael Roy, Michael Ratledge, Geraldine Roy

UK / 1956 / 20 min. / Black and White / No Dialogue

A German soldier fleeing French resistance fighters tries to hide by wearing their uniforms, struggling to survive while filled with fear, and time seems to stand still. The Web, Peter Watkins’s first film, shot on 8 mm film when he was 20, has an anti-war theme whose background and production process reflects Watkins’s childhood experiences during the war: Having spent nights during the bombing of London sheltering under the family dining table, with the silence punctuated by the wail of sirens, Watkins began his filmography with The Web, going on to make multiple films that question war. His encounter with the amateur theater group Playcraft, with whom he produced his first films, came about thanks to his working in a bureaucratic position in Kent to avoid being sent to Kenya as a soldier.

Watkins’s early film, which questions systems and has a humanist perspective, focuses on the effects of war on ordinary people before The Gladiators and Culloden.

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The Diary of an Unknown Soldier

Director:  Peter Watkins

Screenplay:  Peter Watkins

Cast: Brian Robertson, Peter Watkins

UK / 1959 / 17 min. / Black and White / English / Turkish Subtitles

“The last day of my life”… “Watch them cheering. They gained an area of about 200 square yards of mud”. These words, spoken by Peter Watkins himself, belong to the British soldier at the center of The Diary of an Unknown Soldier. In this amateur short film set during World War I, this voice of a soldier who does not want to die is accompanied by images of weapons and other soldiers on the front line. Watkins, who places the soldier at the center, uses his cinematic language to draw the viewer into the soldier's psychology and world.

The film is an early sign of Watkins finding his anti-war, anti-establishment voice that defends the right to life early in his career, as well as his frequent looking back at history. Created with the amateur theater group Playcraft, the film bears traces of an aesthetic that would leave its mark on British independent cinema in the 1960s, particularly through its dynamic camera work and realistic narrative.

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The Forgotten Faces

Director: Peter Watkins

Scenario:  Peter Watkins

Cast: Michael Roy, John Newing, Irene Mallard

UK / 1960 / 17 min. / Black and White / English / Turkish Subtitles

In 1956, teachers, students, technicians, and lawyers in Hungary defied the communist government in a widespread popular uprising, which was violently suppressed. In The Forgotten Faces, Peter Watkins recreates “the wounds of the revolution” in a pseudo-documentary format that would go on to become his signature style. In this film, which he filmed with the amateur theater group Playcraft, transforming the streets of Canterbury into Budapest, the narrative is so realistic that television officials of the time mistook it for archival footage.

Watkins’s early film, which recreates the uprising based on real photographs, stems from similar questions as his final film, La Commune (Paris, 1871), made in 1999: Why do political struggles begin, and what are their costs?

The film, which conveys the questions Watkins has explored throughout his career with dynamic camera work and the detached voiceover of newsreels, also highlights the power of the craft of directing that led to his discovery and hiring by the BBC.