Disoriental

Animated adaptation of Satrapi's own graphic memoir — a girl coming of age in Tehran during and after the 1979 revolution, then in exile, then back home as an adult reckoning with who she's become.

Why it’s here: Satrapi adapted her own story, so nothing here is secondhand. Punk in the plainest sense: the Iranian government denounced it, and she made it anyway. Pedagogical in that it teaches a kid what authoritarianism actually feels like to live through — not the textbook timeline, the daily compromises.

In Tehran, a man named Hossein Sabzian is arrested for posing as the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a family who believed he would put them in his next film. Kiarostami reconstructs the case with the real people playing themselves and films the trial. It is a documentary and a drama at once, and it never tells you where one ends.

Why it’s here: The film asks why a man would pretend to be a director and what that says about who gets seen. What's punk is Kiarostami giving a petty fraudster the dignity of explaining himself, with the trial as theatre. What's pedagogical is the structure: reality and reenactment collide, and you see that every film is a construction. A natural companion to the Godard, Bresson and Bazin books in the catalog.