Hiroshima

Kirsten Johnson has shot documentaries across Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Liberia and the United States, and here she cuts together the footage that never made it into the finished films. There's a birth, a wedding, a dying mother, a sniper's view. It is a memoir in outtakes, and it asks what the person holding the camera owes to the person in front of it.

Why it’s here: The film turns the camera around on the person behind it, and asks what it means to film other people's worst days. What's punk is that it refuses the authority of a neutral observer. What's pedagogical is that it's a direct lesson in media literacy, since it shows how footage becomes a story. It matches the film-craft shelf and pairs with Faces Places and Hale County This Morning, This Evening.

Poland, 1962. Anna is a novice about to take her vows when the mother superior sends her to meet her only living relative, her aunt Wanda, a hard-drinking former state prosecutor. Wanda tells her she is Jewish and that her real name is Ida, and the two women drive into the countryside to find out what happened to her parents. It is shot in black and white, in 82 minutes.

Why it’s here: The film puts Polish complicity in the Holocaust on screen through a quiet road movie. What's punk is Wanda, who once sentenced people for the state and now has to live with it. What's pedagogical is how it handles guilt, memory and what a country hides. Pairs with Number the Stars and Everything is Illuminated.