Snow

Poland, 1962. Anna is a novice about to take her vows when the mother superior sends her to meet her only living relative, her aunt Wanda, a hard-drinking former state prosecutor. Wanda tells her she is Jewish and that her real name is Ida, and the two women drive into the countryside to find out what happened to her parents. It is shot in black and white, in 82 minutes.

Why it’s here: The film puts Polish complicity in the Holocaust on screen through a quiet road movie. What's punk is Wanda, who once sentenced people for the state and now has to live with it. What's pedagogical is how it handles guilt, memory and what a country hides. Pairs with Number the Stars and Everything is Illuminated.

In Chile's Atacama Desert astronomers use the clearest skies on Earth to study the origins of the universe. In the same sand, women are still searching for the bones of relatives disposed of by Pinochet's dictatorship. Guzmán puts them in the same frame: people looking up at stars thirteen billion years old, and people on their knees looking for forty-year-old remains.

Why it’s here: The film makes the case that a country's past has to be dug up before it can be put to rest. What's punk is the women with their small shovels, who outlast the state's silence. What's pedagogical is the way it joins deep time and recent history and invites students to ask who gets to be an archaeologist of their own country. Sits beside Chile-adjacent books like The House of the Spirits. Note: availability data is about eleven weeks old, so re-check.