Maniac Magee

Ayiva and Abas leave Burkina Faso for a better life in Europe. They cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean in a boat that barely floats, and arrive in Rosarno, in southern Italy, to pick oranges for almost no money. The town turns on them. Carpignano made it with real migrants, one of whom stars in it, and based the last act on the 2010 Rosarno riots.

Why it’s here: The film puts the journey on screen and then shows that the arrival is its own crossing. What's punk is the way it was made, with the people who made the trip, and it does not give them a rescue. What's pedagogical is how it can sit beside the news and show that what looks like a border story is also a labor story. Pairs with Exit West, Solito, Enrique's Journey and Fire at Sea (suggested 10-29). Note: it is a fiction film built on real events; scenes of the crossing and violence are intense.

Jimmie Fails wants his grandfather's Victorian house back, the one in the Fillmore that his family lost when the neighborhood changed. The house is now owned by white people who do not live in it. With his friend Mont, a playwright, he starts to move in. A tender, strange film about a city that is erasing the people who made it.

Why it’s here: The film makes gentrification feel like grief and not like a statistic. What's punk is how it turns one house into a stage for the whole displacement story, and how Jimmie and Mont refuse to leave quietly. What's pedagogical is the way it gives students a way to talk about who gets to say a place is theirs. Pairs with The Color of Law, Just Action and Evicted (suggested 10-27). Note: the film is stylized and dreamlike and some critics say it is vague about how the family lost the house.