Small Things Like These

On the Italian island of Lampedusa, a twelve-year-old boy learns to use a slingshot, a doctor treats seasick islanders, and a radio operator hears distress calls from boats in the Mediterranean. The film cuts between the island's daily life and the coast guard rescuing people from overloaded boats. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin.

Why it’s here: The film holds two worlds side by side and refuses to explain either: the island that goes on with its life, and the people who arrive. What's punk is the refusal of voiceover and the absence of a rescue narrative. What's pedagogical is that students can discuss what the camera chooses to look at. Companion to Exit West and Solito. Note: slow and quiet, with scenes of bodies from a rescue.

Watanabe is a Tokyo city-hall bureaucrat who has stamped papers for thirty years. When he learns he is dying, he spends his savings on a night out, finds it empty, and then returns to his office to push through a request from mothers who want a children's playground built on a swamp. The film is in two halves, the second set at his wake.

Why it’s here: The film is about the paperwork that stops anything from being built, and the one man who decides to defeat it. What's punk is the war on bureaucracy, and the wake scene where his colleagues take credit. What's pedagogical is a lesson in how a small act inside a system gets shaped by the people who tell the story after. Kurosawa's memoir is in the catalog as Something Like an Autobiography.