The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth

Six-year-old Moonee spends her summer in a purple motel outside Disney World, where her mother and a lot of other families live because they can't afford anything else. The kids run wild, the manager, played by Willem Dafoe, keeps an eye out, and the adults are always one bad week from the street. It's shot from a child's height, in bright colors.

Why it’s here: The film shows hidden homelessness through a kid's eyes, in the shadow of a theme park. What's punk is that it doesn't ask for pity and it doesn't clean up the mother. What's pedagogical is how clearly it shows what poverty looks like when it's called a motel. Pairs with Evicted and Poverty, by America.

Ava DuVernay's documentary traces one clause of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, from Reconstruction convict leasing through Jim Crow, the War on Drugs and the modern prison boom. Historians, activists and politicians make the case that mass incarceration is slavery's afterlife by another legal name.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the thesis itself: it reads the Constitution's own text as the loophole and then follows the money and the rhetoric, including footage of the politicians who built the machine, straight to the present. The pedagogy is in the method. It teaches a viewer to trace a single policy lever across 150 years instead of treating each era as a separate story, which is a transferable habit of mind. Worth knowing that some historians argue its straight line from slavery to prisons flattens a more tangled history, so watch it as a forceful argument rather than a settled account.