Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

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.

In the summer of 1969, 300,000 people went to Harlem's Mount Morris Park for the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of free concerts with Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson and others. The footage sat in a basement for fifty years. Questlove cuts it together with interviews with the people who were there. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film recovers a piece of Black history that the mainstream skipped while Woodstock got the myth. What's punk is the recovery: the question of who decides which summer gets remembered. What's pedagogical is the way it ties music to the politics of the year, from the Panthers to the moon landing. It sits next to I Am Not Your Negro and Hale County in the catalog's picks.