Bartleby, the Scrivener

Laurent Amédéo leads 1,100 workers at the Perrin plant — a facility that is profitable, whose multinational parent company has decided to close anyway. Stéphane Brizé shoots En guerre with the grain and rhythm of a documentary: non-professional actors in most roles, a handheld camera that can't find a comfortable distance, meetings that go nowhere for a very long time. Vincent Lindon is the union spokesperson who has to translate collective fury into procedure and back again, day after day. The film covers one stretch of a fight that most films would compress into a montage — the press conferences, the back-channel negotiations, the vote counts, the waiting.

Why it’s here: Brizé makes you sit in the room where a decision is being made about other people's lives by people who will never meet them. What's punk about En guerre is the refusal to let that feel abstract — the camera stays at plant-gate level, in the meeting room, on Laurent's face when the call comes in. What's pedagogical is the film's insistence on duration: you feel what it costs to keep a collective together when the institution on the other side is patient and the workers are not. For anyone who has been told that workers in France are just wired differently, that solidarity at this scale isn't something available to us — this film shows the material conditions that make it possible. And it shows what it costs even there.

Diouana, a young Senegalese woman, takes a job as a nanny for a white French couple in Dakar, then follows them to the Riviera expecting a new life. Instead she becomes a maid shut in their flat, watched and owned. It is one of the first great African films and runs about an hour.

Why it’s here: The film makes the colonial relationship small enough to see: one flat, one woman, one mask on a wall. What's punk is Sembène, a Senegalese director, making the film the French would not, with independence barely won and the old arrangements intact. What's pedagogical is the use of space and silence: you read power from where people are allowed to stand. Pairs with Xala, already in the catalog.