Efrén Divided

In a near future where a militarized wall has sealed the US-Mexico border, Mexican workers are no longer let in. Instead they plug into networks through nodes in their bodies and operate robots on the other side, giving the US their labor without the people. Memo leaves his drought-stricken village in Oaxaca, where a corporation now owns the water, for a factory job in Tijuana, and meets Luz, who sells her memories online. Their paths cross with a drone pilot who carries out strikes from a screen in the US.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the premise: Rivera imagines the logical end of globalization, in which an economy keeps the work and sheds the worker, and builds it on a small budget with invention instead of spectacle. The pedagogy is in how it makes three systems read as one: border policy, privatized water and remote warfare all rest on the same arrangement, in which the people who pay the costs are kept out of sight of the people who benefit. It is a science fiction film that shows how to read the present. Critics were mixed on the screenplay and the acting, and praised its ideas over its execution, so watch it for the argument. It is also a rare sci-fi film with Latino leads, often placed in Latinx futurism.

In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican-American teenage loners strike up a friendship that cracks open everything one of them has spent years keeping carefully closed off — including who he is. Adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in its tenderness rather than its edge — a bilingual, bicultural, queer coming-of-age story that doesn't need trauma to justify its own gentleness. Pedagogical in showing how friendship can crack open a kid who's spent years protecting himself by staying closed.