Teaching for Black Lives

The story of Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, who helped start riot grrrl, and then went quiet at the height of her influence. Anderson uses interviews, performance footage and Hanna's own account of why she stopped and what came after. It is both a history of a movement and a portrait of the person who paid for it.

Why it’s here: The film shows how a movement is built by people with a photocopier and a loud voice. What's punk is the insistence that girls get to take up space and say the unsayable. What's pedagogical is the zine culture, the way the music was a tool for organizing and the way an art scene can be a school. Pairs with Notes from Underground, Please Kill Me and Bad Feminist. Note: it is an admiring portrait, and riot grrrl's whiteness and its limits are only touched on.

A documentary about Ferguson, Missouri, in the weeks and months after Michael Brown was killed in 2014, made from the point of view of the residents who organized. It follows activists, mothers and young people in the street and in their kitchens, and shows the tear gas, the armored vehicles and the long, ordinary work of staying. The directors are from the movement and not outside observers.

Why it’s here: The film is a record made by the people it records, not about them. What's punk is that the camera is in the crowd, and the story is told in the voice of the protesters. What's pedagogical is that it can sit beside the news coverage of the same events and be compared with it. Pairs with The Hate U Give, The New Jim Crow and Just Mercy (suggested 10-26). Note: it is openly partisan, it shows violence and the aftermath of a police killing, and it does not include the police or the city's account.