Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Ava DuVernay's documentary traces one clause of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, from Reconstruction convict leasing through Jim Crow, the War on Drugs and the modern prison boom. Historians, activists and politicians make the case that mass incarceration is slavery's afterlife by another legal name.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the thesis itself: it reads the Constitution's own text as the loophole and then follows the money and the rhetoric, including footage of the politicians who built the machine, straight to the present. The pedagogy is in the method. It teaches a viewer to trace a single policy lever across 150 years instead of treating each era as a separate story, which is a transferable habit of mind. Worth knowing that some historians argue its straight line from slavery to prisons flattens a more tangled history, so watch it as a forceful argument rather than a settled account.

A Chinese-owned auto-glass plant reopens a shuttered Ohio GM factory, and cultural and labor tensions surface as American and Chinese workers try to build something together.

Why it’s here: Refuses the easy version of this story — nobody here is simply the hero or the problem, Chinese management included. The first film the Obamas' production company ever released, and it earns that distinction by trusting the footage over a thesis.