Hope in the Dark

In the early 1970s, a ramshackle summer camp for teenagers with disabilities near Woodstock, Camp Jened, ran on hippie rules: no adults in charge of the kids' lives. The campers, among them co-director James LeBrecht and the future activist Judy Heumann, went on to organize the sit-ins and protests that helped win the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was produced for Netflix and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film shows that a movement can begin as a summer. What's punk is that the people it follows organize without asking permission, and refuse to be treated as objects of pity. What's pedagogical is the through-line from a place where kids ran their own lives to a federal law that changed what was possible. It's a rare entry on disability and civil rights, and a natural fit for DoCR's self-organization principle.

Britain, 1984. A group of London lesbian and gay activists decides the striking coal miners being crushed by the Thatcher government are fighting the same enemy they are, and starts raising money for a Welsh mining village. The village doesn't know what to make of them, and the feeling is mutual. Based on a true story.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the alliance: two groups that had every social reason to stay apart chose solidarity on the strength of a shared opponent, and the film lets the awkwardness, the prejudice and the first dance-floor thaw all play out on screen. The pedagogy is in how organizing actually works. Coalitions get built through food, favors and showing up, not through agreeing on everything, and the film makes that feel like something a viewer could do. It is a crowd-pleasing dramatization, so some characters and events are composited or invented, and it is worth reading up on the real Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign afterward.