All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

At Carver High, overachiever Tracy Flick is running unopposed for student body president, and her teacher, Mr. McAllister, decides he cannot let that happen. What starts as a dry school comedy turns into a story of a rigged contest, small cruelties, and the quiet ways adults twist power. A black comedy that treats a high-school vote like a presidential one.

Why it’s here: It's a film about who gets to run and who gets stopped. What's punk is a satire that lets neither the system nor its self-righteous teacher off the hook. What's pedagogical is Tracy herself, a character viewers read very differently depending on their age, which is its own lesson in bias. Pairs with Idiocracy, Dr. Strangelove and How Democracies Die. Note: R-rated; sexual content between an adult and a student, played for discomfort; teens and adults. English.

In a Zambian village, an eight-year-old girl is accused of witchcraft after a small incident and sent to a government-run witch camp, where the women are tied to spools of white ribbon so they can't fly away. She is made a tourist attraction and a courtroom tool. A deadpan satire from a Zambian-Welsh director about how belief becomes an industry.

Why it’s here: It's what a society does to someone who is made a spectacle. What's punk is the dry comedy of bureaucracy and tourism turning a child into an exhibit. What's pedagogical is the question it leaves: who benefits from the story? Pairs with Things Fall Apart, The Famished Road and Satanic Verses (suggested 10-22). Note: dark comedy, with a child at the center and no easy rescue; Nyoni drew on real witch camps in Ghana. English, Bemba and Nyanja with subtitles.