Featuring a cast of 192 non-professional actors, Evening Land depicts two interrelated media events in Europe during the mid-1970s: a workers’ strike at a shipyard in Copenhagen and the kidnapping of a Danish official by a guerilla organisation during a summit meeting of European Common Market ministers in Copenhagen. Against a backdrop of brutal police violence, unemployment, recession, state repression and political dissent, Watkins examines Denmark's ‘model’ social democracy through a complex, dialectical editing structure.
It is made up of numerous views which are continuously changing, and thus the terms of the dialectic shift every time a new juxtaposition is posed. These permutations multiply throughout the film, and as such, its very structure comes to reflect the difficulties of coming to understand the pressures and implications of events which affect us today.
Joseph Gomez
Evening Land won the Golden Prize at the 1977 Moscow International Film Festival.