A Different Pond

Jess is a British Punjabi eighteen-year-old in West London who plays soccer better than anyone in her park, and her parents want her to learn to cook a full Indian dinner. She joins a women's team behind their backs, falls for her coach, and has to find a way to be both daughters at once. It's a comedy with a wedding, an ugly sports bra and a lot of heart.

Why it’s here: The film makes a joke out of the fight between family expectations and a girl's ambition, and the girl wins on her own terms. What's punk is that Jess isn't asked to choose between her people and her game. What's pedagogical is how it handles racism, sexism and homophobia in a form a family can watch together. Pairs with Persepolis and Funny Boy.

In a poor neighborhood of Tehran, nine-year-old Ali loses his little sister Zahra's only pair of shoes. Their family can't afford another pair, and their father can barely cover the rent, so the two keep it secret and share Ali's sneakers, swapping them between her morning school shift and his afternoon one. Ali sees a chance to win a pair at a children's race, and everything comes down to it.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the scale: Majidi makes a film about poverty without a villain, a speech or a rescue, and trusts the children's point of view to carry all of it. Nothing in it is shouted. The shoes are the whole argument. The pedagogy is in that restraint. A young viewer sees what a missing pair of shoes costs a family, how kids shield their parents from shame, and how much dignity and care two siblings can hold at once. It is warm and funny and never sentimental, and it is an easy first film from outside the English-speaking world. Majidi worked inside Iran's censorship system, and the film keeps politics out of frame by design, so its critique of class comes through the situation and not through anything the characters say. Good for the whole family, with subtitles.