Harbor Me

Jimmie Fails wants his grandfather's Victorian house back, the one in the Fillmore that his family lost when the neighborhood changed. The house is now owned by white people who do not live in it. With his friend Mont, a playwright, he starts to move in. A tender, strange film about a city that is erasing the people who made it.

Why it’s here: The film makes gentrification feel like grief and not like a statistic. What's punk is how it turns one house into a stage for the whole displacement story, and how Jimmie and Mont refuse to leave quietly. What's pedagogical is the way it gives students a way to talk about who gets to say a place is theirs. Pairs with The Color of Law, Just Action and Evicted (suggested 10-27). Note: the film is stylized and dreamlike and some critics say it is vague about how the family lost the house.

A year in a one-room village school in the Auvergne, France, where a single teacher, Georges Lopez, teaches children from four to eleven. Philibert watches without narration: a boy who won't write, a fight over a lost cap, a farm child learning to read. It became one of the biggest French documentaries ever.

Why it’s here: The film is a record of a teacher who lets time and mixed ages do much of the work. What's punk is the absence of rankings and tests, and that nothing happens except learning. What's pedagogical is how it shows a classroom without a screen, a mixed-age group and a patient adult. A quiet companion to The Class and Summerhill School. Note: Lopez sued the director in 2003 for a share of the profits and lost.