No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

In a courtyard in Bamako, Mali, a real trial is staged: African civil society puts the World Bank and the IMF in the dock for the damage done by structural adjustment. Lawyers argue, witnesses testify, and around them the family life of the yard goes on: a singer, a husband and wife whose marriage is breaking, a man building a grave. Sissako lets a western play on a television in the background. It is a film that argues, and is also a film about people.

Why it’s here: It's a film that puts debt and aid on trial, in the courtyard where they land. What's punk is the staging: the powerful are summoned to a poor man's yard and made to answer. What's pedagogical is the way it makes an abstract system concrete, with testimony, cross-examination and the lives around it. Pairs with Debt, The Shock Doctrine and Xala. Note: slow, argumentative and in French and Bambara with subtitles; includes a staged western spoof and an intentionally uncomfortable moment of violence. Sissako's Timbuktu was suggested 10-14.

In a Durham mining town during the 1984 strike, eleven-year-old Billy is sent to boxing lessons and sneaks into the ballet class next door. His father and brother are on the picket line, and the idea that Billy might dance is almost as hard for them as the strike. It is a family story, a class story and a story about who is allowed to want what.

Why it’s here: It's a film about what a community does with a kid who doesn't fit. What's punk is the strike behind the story: the film doesn't treat the picket line as a backdrop. What's pedagogical is the question it asks at the dinner table: who decides what boys are allowed to love? Pairs with Pride (suggested 10-14), The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and Julian Is a Mermaid. Note: strike-era police violence and homophobic and gender-policing insults; PG-13 equivalent (15 in the UK).