Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

Mexico City, 1970-71. Cleo is a live-in domestic worker for a middle-class family whose father is walking out; she's also pregnant and abandoned, moving through a city on the edge of state violence. Cuarón shot it in black and white from his own childhood memories and the woman who raised him, letting the camera linger on the labor that holds a household up and gets no credit.

Why it’s here: The film is built on the argument that the people who keep a house running are the ones the house doesn't see. What's punk is its refusal to put the family's drama at the center and its quiet insistence on the nanny's. What's pedagogical is how class, race and gender sit in the same frame without commentary, and how a political massacre in the street is just part of a Tuesday for the people living through it.

Dakar, Senegal. The young construction workers building a gleaming tower go months without pay and one night take a boat out to sea, hoping to reach Spain. Ada, promised to a wealthy man she doesn't love, is left behind with the women who loved them. Then strange fevers begin to spread, the workers' employer is made to answer for what he owes, and the missing start to return at night.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the genre: Diop takes the migration story that European cinema usually films from the boat or the border and tells it from the shore, as a love story that turns into a ghost story that turns into a demand for payment. The pedagogy is in what that reframing teaches. It shows the labor exploitation behind a luxury skyline, the women who are left to absorb the loss, and grief as something that can organize a community into action, without ever lecturing. It is slow and dreamlike, and some viewers will find it opaque, but that is part of how it asks you to look at who disappears and who pays.