The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions

MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that a face-recognition system can't see her face unless she puts on a white mask. She follows the thread to police departments, landlords and schools that are using such systems, and to the activists in London and New York who are pushing back. It's a documentary about who gets watched and who gets judged by software.

Why it’s here: The film shows how algorithms inherit the prejudice of the people who built them, and who gets hurt first. What's punk is that a graduate student's anomaly turns into a campaign against the tech industry. What's pedagogical is how clearly it explains training data and error rates to a general audience. Pairs with Deep Unlearning, Automating Inequality and Your Face Belongs to Us.

Basel Adra grew up in Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages in the West Bank that the Israeli army declared a firing zone and has been demolishing for years. He films it. Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist, joins him, and the two become friends while the bulldozers come back. It's shot over five years by a Palestinian and Israeli collective, and it won the Oscar for Best Documentary.

Why it’s here: The film makes the slow work of displacement visible: a school flattened, a well filled with cement, a family in a cave. What's punk is the people filming it, who are the people it's happening to, and the Palestinian-Israeli friendship at the center. What's pedagogical is how it shows an eviction as a process, with paperwork. It fits the Palestine bundle and sits beside 5 Broken Cameras. Note: Hamdan Ballal was assaulted by settlers after the Oscars.