Punishment Park [1971]
This is a weird fake-documentary about people rounded up and convicted to years of imprisonment during the Vietnam War for crimes of subversion, opposing the war-effort, draft-dodging, and spreading subversive, anti-government, anti-war, anti-capitalist or communist material. They are hauled before a tribunal that questions them on their motives, at the end of which they are given a choice; do their time, or do a three day run at Punishment Park, an area of the southern Californian desert in which they can earn their freedom by outrunning law-enforcers. If they can reach an American flag before national guardsmen, police officers and other law enforcers have captured them, they get their freedom. The odds are stacked against them, because they no water, no shelter, and no arms, and have to outrun well-organised, well-trained and well-equiped law-enforcers. Inevitably, things get violent and people die.
And all of this is filmed by British and German documentary makers. Which gives everything a very real sense of it being a documentary, to the point where sometimes you forget that it’s fictional.
Great, but weird. And it gives a good feel from what I can gather, of the political climate and popular opinion of the Vietnam War during the late 60s and early 70s.