The Hungry Tide

In 1947 Lahore, an eight-year-old girl from a wealthy Parsi family watches her beloved nanny's circle of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh friends turn on one another as Partition tears the city apart. Adapted from Bapsi Sidhwa's novel Cracking India.

Why it’s here: Punk in filtering Partition's violence through a child's understanding rather than a historian's distance — Lenny watches trusted adults turn on each other seemingly overnight. Pedagogical in showing how quickly manufactured religious division can override decades of actual, lived friendship.

A poor Brahmin family in a Bengal village: a father who dreams of being a poet and cannot earn a living, a mother holding the household together, a mischievous older sister, Durga, and a small boy, Apu, who watches everything. Over a few seasons, the film follows their days, a train glimpsed through the fields, a monsoon, a death. It is the first of the Apu Trilogy, made on a tiny budget with first-time actors.

Why it’s here: The film looks at poverty through the eyes of a child and never lectures. What's punk is that it was made by a first-time director with borrowed money and non-professional cast, and it changed world cinema. What's pedagogical is the slowness: it teaches you to see a life carefully. It sits next to A Fine Balance and the other South Asian titles in the catalog, and Satyajit Ray is a core film-school name.