Nervous Conditions

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.

Five orphaned sisters in a remote Turkish village are caught playing with boys on the last day of school. Their family reads the afternoon as a scandal, and the house is converted bit by bit into a place of bars, chaperones and arranged marriages, while the youngest sisters plot a way out.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the tone: Ergüven shoots the girls as a pack of golden, tangled, laughing bodies, so the reader feels the freedom being taken away and not just told about it. The pedagogy is in how it traces the machinery. Surveillance gets dressed up as care, honor as love, and a whole community participates without a villain in the room, which is how restriction actually works. It deals with the forced marriage of teenage girls and some of the harm that follows, handled with restraint rather than spectacle, so it suits older teens and adults.