Nectar in a Sieve

In a poor neighborhood of Tehran, nine-year-old Ali loses his little sister Zahra's only pair of shoes. Their family can't afford another pair, and their father can barely cover the rent, so the two keep it secret and share Ali's sneakers, swapping them between her morning school shift and his afternoon one. Ali sees a chance to win a pair at a children's race, and everything comes down to it.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the scale: Majidi makes a film about poverty without a villain, a speech or a rescue, and trusts the children's point of view to carry all of it. Nothing in it is shouted. The shoes are the whole argument. The pedagogy is in that restraint. A young viewer sees what a missing pair of shoes costs a family, how kids shield their parents from shame, and how much dignity and care two siblings can hold at once. It is warm and funny and never sentimental, and it is an easy first film from outside the English-speaking world. Majidi worked inside Iran's censorship system, and the film keeps politics out of frame by design, so its critique of class comes through the situation and not through anything the characters say. Good for the whole family, with subtitles.

Steve James followed two Black teenagers from Chicago's housing projects, William Gates and Arthur Agee, for five years as they tried to turn basketball into a way out. They are recruited to a suburban Catholic school, injured, dropped and picked up again, and their families pay for it. The film runs three hours and doesn't hurry.

Why it’s here: The film takes apart the idea that sports is the way out by staying with the families when it doesn't work. What's punk is that the boys and their parents are the authors of the story. What's pedagogical is how clearly it shows tuition, scouting and recruiting as systems. Pairs with Most Likely to Succeed and The Shame of the Nation.