Perhaps the least seen of Watkins’s many near-invisible films, Evening Land examines the ways in which Denmark’s "model" social democracy might come to be affected by contemporary societal ills: unemployment, growing defense ties among European Common Market countries, terrorist kidnappings, and nationwide strikes. Assembling a cast of 192 nonprofessional actors, Watkins constructs the intricate story of a strike in a Copenhagen shipyard, prompted by the management’s acceptance of a contract to build the hulls for four nuclear missile submarines for the French navy. Although different in style from much of Watkins’s other work, the film’s dialectic structure again attempts to force the audience to reevaluate the forms of film and television by extending them beyond their conventional "response-oriented" uses.