The Journey
(Resan)
Sweden, 1988, 16mm, color and b&w, 134 min.
Multilingual with English subtitles.
Years in the making, this monumental film dedicated to peace was a pioneering attempt at a fully international cinema. Watkins worked with groups around the world, raising money and assembling casts and crews in the U.S., Canada, Norway, Scotland, France, West Germany, Mozambique, Japan, Australia, Tahiti, and Mexico. The Journey consists of Watkins’s extended conversations with families and nongovernmental organizations about the arms race and its relationship to world hunger, gender politics, and the functioning of the mass media; gripping personal recollections of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Hamburg during World War II; and the dramatization of evacuation scenarios by community groups. Structured intricately into nineteen separate chapters (of which we present three), the film weaves carefully composed juxta-positions of visual and sound motifs into a powerfully wrought experience.