To put it bluntly, one could say that most of de Antonio’s films are courtroom dramas. In this sense, “In the King of Prussia” is typical – and at the same time unusual, starting with the title. King of Prussia is a small town in Pennsylvania which became the scene of an action by radical Christian pacifists in September 1980. They broke into a factory where, unbeknownst to the public, parts of the nuclear missile Mark 12A were produced, and held a happening inspired by the Sermon on the Mount and Fluxus. The film is a re-enactment, but not of the action, rather of the trial against the so-called Plowshares Eight. In de Antonio’s first video production, shot in the trial breaks, the defendants played themselves. The role of the judge was played by New Hollywood star Martin Sheen.

The film opens with an image of the statue of Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette who fought on the side of the rebels in the American War of Independence (1775–1783), to which is added a diffuse soundscape in which one can distinguish the extremely slowed down noise of helicopter rotors. “The music of America today is the helicopter in Vietnam. That’s ‘musique concrète’,” de Antonio explained in 1969. By recalling a time when the so-called New World was a British colony itself, the US invasion of Vietnam is put in the context of a long history of liberation whose contemporary heroe is the Vietnamese people. “In the Year of the Pig” remains one of the most unusual and illuminating films about this war and others that followed.