Brilliantly staged mockumentary that is more explosive today than ever: in the early 1970s, a fictional America is shaken by the Vietnam War, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and student unrest. US President Nixon declares a state of emergency and uses an emergency law to rigorously arrest all dissidents, people who criticize the war and the regime. The convicts can choose between a prison sentence of several years or three days in Bear Mountain Penal Park to fight for their freedom. A British film crew accompanies punishment group 637 to a desert zone south of California, where the "Punishment Park" turns out to be a brutally deadly game of cat and mouse: In the scorching desert heat, they have to cover almost 100km of rough terrain on foot and without food in order to reach the American flag set up at their destination. The desperate resisters are chased by heavily armed forces. A large military tent stands at the edge of the penal park, in which the defendants of the subsequent penal group 638 are being sentenced by a civilian emergency court... Peter Watkin's bitter reckoning with fascist tendencies in the USA takes the form of a mockumentary (a mixture of 'to mock' and 'documentary'), i.e. a fake documentary set in a fictitious America. The reactions to the provocative film at the time were tantamount to a quasi-banishment. After no distributor dared to release the film in cinemas for fear of government reprisals, American TV also refused to show "Punishment Park" for almost 30 years. A similar fate befell Watkin's "The War Game" (1965), which was locked away unpublished by the BBC in the UK. For all its factual exaggeration, "Punishment Park" is a gripping and brutal fable that has lost none of its impact to this day and is particularly shockingly topical in view of current developments in the USA. In view of the greatest crimes in human history, Watkin's film generally functions as an angry indictment of authoritarian abuse of power, the perversion of law and order and the powerlessness of the citizen - and is not least an impressive reflection on the media.