Peter Watkins - Biography

Peter Watkins began his career in advertising as an assistant producer and turned to amateur filmmaking in the late 1950s. In the mid-'60s he was commissioned by BBC-TV to make two feature-length docudramas incorporating a quasi-newsreel style and nonprofessional actors. The second of these, La bombe (1965), graphically portrayed the nightmare of nuclear war and was banned from broadcast. It was subsequently released in theaters and earned a best documentary Oscar in 1966. Watkins enjoyed modest success with the commercial feature film Privilège (1967), but has subsequently worked primarily in the documentary genre, based in various Scandinavian countries. One of his more recent films, Resan (1987), is an 873-minute (14-hour) epic that addresses such issues as the arms race and global hunger.