Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed's Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East

A documentary about the American war in Vietnam, made while the war was still being fought. Davis intercuts interviews with generals, officials, pilots, veterans, grieving Vietnamese families and ordinary Americans, setting the language of policy against what that policy did on the ground and at home.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the editing: Davis lets the war's architects talk at length, then cuts their words against a funeral, a bombed village or a cheering football crowd, and trusts the audience to feel the gap. The pedagogy is in how the film teaches viewers to hear the language of power, euphemism and abstraction included, while looking at what it covers up. Worth knowing that the juxtaposition is the argument, and General Westmoreland and others objected that their words were framed unfairly, so watch it as a persuasive documentary, not a neutral record.

A Palestinian farmer in Bil'in documents his village's nonviolent resistance to encroaching Israeli settlements over five years, structured around each of his cameras' destruction.

Why it’s here: Shot almost entirely by a Palestinian farmer with no filmmaking background, on cameras that kept getting destroyed and kept getting replaced — testimony in the most literal sense, edited (not directed) into shape by an Israeli co-director after the fact.