The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

A French documentary that skips the catastrophe reel and goes looking for what's already working. A small crew travels through ten countries, visiting people who are rebuilding agriculture, energy, the economy, democracy and education from the ground up, from urban farms and local currencies to community-run energy and radically different schools.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the refusal of doom: the film treats despair as a luxury and goes out to document people who simply started doing the thing, crowdfunding its own production on the way. The pedagogy is in the structure. Five chapters make the systems visible (food, energy, money, power, learning) and show that each one can be redesigned at human scale, which is a useful habit of mind for a young person who has only heard that everything is broken. It is optimistic by design, and says less about the political and economic power that blocks these ideas at scale, so watch it as a catalogue of possibility rather than a full account of how change happens.

A Chinese-owned auto-glass plant reopens a shuttered Ohio GM factory, and cultural and labor tensions surface as American and Chinese workers try to build something together.

Why it’s here: Refuses the easy version of this story — nobody here is simply the hero or the problem, Chinese management included. The first film the Obamas' production company ever released, and it earns that distinction by trusting the footage over a thesis.