Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

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.

County Cork, 1920. Damien, a young doctor about to leave for London, joins his brother Teddy in the IRA after watching British soldiers brutalise his neighbours. The film follows the war for independence, and then the Anglo-Irish Treaty that splits the brothers and the movement, when the people who fought together find they wanted different freedoms. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2006.

Why it’s here: The film is about what happens after the revolution wins half of what it asked for. What's punk is that Loach sides with the ones who wanted more than a flag, and shows the cost of choosing. What's pedagogical is the treaty argument itself, which plays out in a room and shows how people who fought for the same thing end up on opposite sides. Pairs with Say Nothing.