Passing

On New Year's Eve 2008, Oscar Grant spends the last day of his life with his daughter, his girlfriend and his mother, trying to be better than he has been. He's shot by a transit police officer on a BART platform in Oakland a few hours after midnight. Coogler made it as his first feature, and it begins with the real cell phone video.

Why it’s here: The film gives a man who became a headline a whole day, and makes the viewer sit with how ordinary it was. What's punk is that it starts with the real video and refuses to turn him into a symbol. What's pedagogical is how it rebuilds a person from a statistic. Pairs with The Hate U Give, Just Mercy and the Dear White People pick. It is a dramatization and shows the shooting.

In 1992, Yance Ford's brother William was shot and killed by a white mechanic in Long Island. No one was charged. A quarter of a century later, Ford turns the camera on the family, the case and the legal system that decided what counted as fear. The film is quiet, direct, and built from interviews with his mother, sister and the people who knew William.

Why it’s here: It's a film about a family told that its grief did not count. What's punk is how still it is: no reenactments, just faces and a legal system on the record. What's pedagogical is how it shows the machinery of a verdict, which turns out to be a story about who is allowed to be afraid. Pairs with Just Mercy, The New Jim Crow and Between the World and Me. Note: PG-13/R; discusses a killing and its aftermath; slow and personal; adults and mature teens. English.