A Paradise Built in Hell

Britain, 1984. A group of London lesbian and gay activists decides the striking coal miners being crushed by the Thatcher government are fighting the same enemy they are, and starts raising money for a Welsh mining village. The village doesn't know what to make of them, and the feeling is mutual. Based on a true story.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the alliance: two groups that had every social reason to stay apart chose solidarity on the strength of a shared opponent, and the film lets the awkwardness, the prejudice and the first dance-floor thaw all play out on screen. The pedagogy is in how organizing actually works. Coalitions get built through food, favors and showing up, not through agreeing on everything, and the film makes that feel like something a viewer could do. It is a crowd-pleasing dramatization, so some characters and events are composited or invented, and it is worth reading up on the real Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign afterward.

A French documentary that skips the catastrophe reel and goes looking for what's already working. A small crew travels through ten countries, visiting people who are rebuilding agriculture, energy, the economy, democracy and education from the ground up, from urban farms and local currencies to community-run energy and radically different schools.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the refusal of doom: the film treats despair as a luxury and goes out to document people who simply started doing the thing, crowdfunding its own production on the way. The pedagogy is in the structure. Five chapters make the systems visible (food, energy, money, power, learning) and show that each one can be redesigned at human scale, which is a useful habit of mind for a young person who has only heard that everything is broken. It is optimistic by design, and says less about the political and economic power that blocks these ideas at scale, so watch it as a catalogue of possibility rather than a full account of how change happens.