Brazil

Days after burying its matriarch, a small town in Brazil's rural sertão vanishes from every map, its water supply is cut, and a group of wealthy foreign mercenaries arrives to hunt its residents for sport — only to discover Bacurau has no intention of dying quietly.

Why it’s here: Punk in turning class rage into genre carnage — a marginalized town doesn't wait for institutions to save it, it arms itself and fights back on its own terms. Pedagogical in showing how disappearing a place from official maps is itself a form of violence, before a single shot is fired.

Across three decades in a Rio de Janeiro favela, a would-be photographer named Rocket watches childhood friends rise and fall in an escalating war between rival drug gangs. Adapted from Paulo Lins's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in refusing poverty-porn distance — Rocket's camera loves this place even while showing exactly how it consumes its kids. Pedagogical in tracing how a neighborhood's violence is manufactured by absence: no jobs, no school, no state, just guns filling the vacuum.