Dreamland Burning

On New Year's Eve 2008, Oscar Grant spends the last day of his life with his daughter, his girlfriend and his mother, trying to be better than he has been. He's shot by a transit police officer on a BART platform in Oakland a few hours after midnight. Coogler made it as his first feature, and it begins with the real cell phone video.

Why it’s here: The film gives a man who became a headline a whole day, and makes the viewer sit with how ordinary it was. What's punk is that it starts with the real video and refuses to turn him into a symbol. What's pedagogical is how it rebuilds a person from a statistic. Pairs with The Hate U Give, Just Mercy and the Dear White People pick. It is a dramatization and shows the shooting.

Fox Rich spent two decades campaigning to free her husband Rob from a 60-year sentence for a robbery they both took part in, and she filmed her family throughout. Garrett Bradley builds the film from that home video in black and white, with no narrator, so you feel the years pass. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film shows what a long sentence does to a family by staying with the waiting. What's punk is that Fox Rich is the organizer, the filmmaker and the hero of her own story. What's pedagogical is the arithmetic of sentencing and what it takes to get a hearing. Pairs with The New Jim Crow and The Sun Does Shine.