Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People

Noujaim spent the weeks of the 2003 Iraq invasion inside Al Jazeera's newsroom in Doha, Qatar, and in the US military's media center nearby. We meet an Al Jazeera producer, a veteran editor and a Marine press officer, and all of them are trying to tell the same war to different audiences.

Why it’s here: The film is a lesson in how the same event becomes two stories. What's punk is the way it takes the network Americans were told to distrust and lets us see how it works. What's pedagogical is that it gives students a frame for asking who is telling this and why. Pairs with Manufacturing Consent and This Is Not Propaganda. Note: made in 2004, so it's a time capsule; the Marine press officer, Josh Rushing, later joined Al Jazeera, which the film doesn't show.

A four-part essay-series by the director of I Am Not Your Negro, following the sentence that Conrad's Kurtz wrote on his report in Heart of Darkness. Peck narrates a history of colonialism, genocide and white supremacy from Columbus to the American West to the Congo, mixing archive footage, animation and staged scenes. It is the story the textbooks soften.

Why it’s here: The series connects things the curriculum keeps apart: colonial violence, slavery, the Holocaust, and the ideas that justified each. What's punk is the refusal of the neutral tone, and the fact that it names the thread. What's pedagogical is that it can be paused, discussed and argued with. Pairs with Discourse on Colonialism, Orientalism and King Leopold's Ghost. Note: it is long, essayistic and dense, and some critics call its sweep too broad.