Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture

In the early 1970s, a ramshackle summer camp for teenagers with disabilities near Woodstock, Camp Jened, ran on hippie rules: no adults in charge of the kids' lives. The campers, among them co-director James LeBrecht and the future activist Judy Heumann, went on to organize the sit-ins and protests that helped win the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was produced for Netflix and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film shows that a movement can begin as a summer. What's punk is that the people it follows organize without asking permission, and refuse to be treated as objects of pity. What's pedagogical is the through-line from a place where kids ran their own lives to a federal law that changed what was possible. It's a rare entry on disability and civil rights, and a natural fit for DoCR's self-organization principle.

Watanabe is a Tokyo city-hall bureaucrat who has stamped papers for thirty years. When he learns he is dying, he spends his savings on a night out, finds it empty, and then returns to his office to push through a request from mothers who want a children's playground built on a swamp. The film is in two halves, the second set at his wake.

Why it’s here: The film is about the paperwork that stops anything from being built, and the one man who decides to defeat it. What's punk is the war on bureaucracy, and the wake scene where his colleagues take credit. What's pedagogical is a lesson in how a small act inside a system gets shaped by the people who tell the story after. Kurosawa's memoir is in the catalog as Something Like an Autobiography.