Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice

The story of Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, who helped start riot grrrl, and then went quiet at the height of her influence. Anderson uses interviews, performance footage and Hanna's own account of why she stopped and what came after. It is both a history of a movement and a portrait of the person who paid for it.

Why it’s here: The film shows how a movement is built by people with a photocopier and a loud voice. What's punk is the insistence that girls get to take up space and say the unsayable. What's pedagogical is the zine culture, the way the music was a tool for organizing and the way an art scene can be a school. Pairs with Notes from Underground, Please Kill Me and Bad Feminist. Note: it is an admiring portrait, and riot grrrl's whiteness and its limits are only touched on.

MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that a face-recognition system can't see her face unless she puts on a white mask. She follows the thread to police departments, landlords and schools that are using such systems, and to the activists in London and New York who are pushing back. It's a documentary about who gets watched and who gets judged by software.

Why it’s here: The film shows how algorithms inherit the prejudice of the people who built them, and who gets hurt first. What's punk is that a graduate student's anomaly turns into a campaign against the tech industry. What's pedagogical is how clearly it explains training data and error rates to a general audience. Pairs with Deep Unlearning, Automating Inequality and Your Face Belongs to Us.