Kintu

Diouana, a young Senegalese woman, takes a job as a nanny for a white French couple in Dakar, then follows them to the Riviera expecting a new life. Instead she becomes a maid shut in their flat, watched and owned. It is one of the first great African films and runs about an hour.

Why it’s here: The film makes the colonial relationship small enough to see: one flat, one woman, one mask on a wall. What's punk is Sembène, a Senegalese director, making the film the French would not, with independence barely won and the old arrangements intact. What's pedagogical is the use of space and silence: you read power from where people are allowed to stand. Pairs with Xala, already in the catalog.

1902, the Sea Islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coast. Three generations of Gullah women gather for a last day together before part of the family migrates north to the mainland, weighing what they carry from their African ancestors against what the future is calling them toward.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the form: Julie Dash refused the pacing, plot and explanatory voiceover a Hollywood period drama expects, and built a film from Gullah language, ritual and memory instead, narrated partly by an unborn child. The pedagogy is in what that costs and gives you. It teaches a viewer to read a culture on its own terms, and puts the question of what a family keeps and what it lets go at the center rather than treating it as backdrop. It is slow and non-linear by design, so it rewards a second watch and a conversation afterward more than a casual first one.