The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat

Laura Poitras films Edward Snowden's first meetings with journalists in a Hong Kong hotel room as he hands over evidence of mass NSA surveillance.

Why it’s here: Poitras was already filming when Snowden reached out, so this isn't reconstructed after the fact — it's the actual hotel room, the actual first read of the documents, tension that isn't staged because nobody knew yet how it would end.

Chile, 1988: under international pressure, the Pinochet regime agrees to a yes-or-no plebiscite on its own rule. An ad executive, played by Gael García Bernal, is hired to run the opposition's fifteen-minute daily TV slot, and he argues the campaign shouldn't be about the regime's crimes but about joy. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Why it’s here: The film puts a hard question on the table: do you defeat a dictator with truth, or with a jingle? What's punk is that it takes the ad campaign seriously as political work, and shows what it costs people who lived through the dictatorship to watch their grief become a pitch. What's pedagogical is the media-literacy lesson built into the plot. It pairs with The Shock Doctrine and This Is Not Propaganda, and it stands as a counterpoint to the many films about the regime's brutality.