The Boy at the Back of the Class

London, 2027. No child has been born anywhere on Earth in eighteen years. Britain has sealed its borders, hunts refugees and keeps order with a police state, while the rest of the world falls apart. Theo, a jaded civil servant and former activist, is pulled into smuggling a young woman out of the country, because she is pregnant.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the refusal to explain: Cuarón builds a future that looks like a slightly worse present, with caged immigrants, suicide kits and bombings as background noise, and trusts you to notice. The long, unbroken takes put you inside the chaos instead of watching it from a safe seat. The pedagogy is in how it shows a society coming apart from the top: fear of outsiders sold as safety, resistance groups fighting each other, and hope treated as something fragile that has to be carried by hand. It is violent and bleak, so it suits adults and older teens, and its final note is hope, not despair.

Laurent Amédéo leads 1,100 workers at the Perrin plant — a facility that is profitable, whose multinational parent company has decided to close anyway. Stéphane Brizé shoots En guerre with the grain and rhythm of a documentary: non-professional actors in most roles, a handheld camera that can't find a comfortable distance, meetings that go nowhere for a very long time. Vincent Lindon is the union spokesperson who has to translate collective fury into procedure and back again, day after day. The film covers one stretch of a fight that most films would compress into a montage — the press conferences, the back-channel negotiations, the vote counts, the waiting.

Why it’s here: Brizé makes you sit in the room where a decision is being made about other people's lives by people who will never meet them. What's punk about En guerre is the refusal to let that feel abstract — the camera stays at plant-gate level, in the meeting room, on Laurent's face when the call comes in. What's pedagogical is the film's insistence on duration: you feel what it costs to keep a collective together when the institution on the other side is patient and the workers are not. For anyone who has been told that workers in France are just wired differently, that solidarity at this scale isn't something available to us — this film shows the material conditions that make it possible. And it shows what it costs even there.