Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism

In 2021, twenty-six royal treasures looted by French troops from the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892 are returned to Benin. Diop follows one artifact, a statue numbered 26, as it is packed up in Paris and carried home, and ends with Beninese students arguing over what the return means and who it is for. Part documentary, part essay, with the statue itself given a voice.

Why it’s here: It's a film about what it takes to return what was taken. What's punk is a statue that speaks and a room of students who tell the government it's not enough, twenty-six pieces out of thousands. What's pedagogical is the debate at the end: who owns history, and who decides? Pairs with Open Veins of Latin America, King Leopold's Ghost and Discourse on Colonialism. Note: short (68 minutes), slow and poetic; French, Fon and English with subtitles.

Watanabe is a Tokyo city-hall bureaucrat who has stamped papers for thirty years. When he learns he is dying, he spends his savings on a night out, finds it empty, and then returns to his office to push through a request from mothers who want a children's playground built on a swamp. The film is in two halves, the second set at his wake.

Why it’s here: The film is about the paperwork that stops anything from being built, and the one man who decides to defeat it. What's punk is the war on bureaucracy, and the wake scene where his colleagues take credit. What's pedagogical is a lesson in how a small act inside a system gets shaped by the people who tell the story after. Kurosawa's memoir is in the catalog as Something Like an Autobiography.