The Orphan Master's Son

East Berlin, 1984. A Stasi captain is assigned to bug a playwright and his actress partner, a job that is really about a minister's appetite for a woman. As he listens to their lives through headphones, the surveillance state's most loyal listener starts to be changed by what he hears. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Why it’s here: The film shows what surveillance costs on both sides of the wire: the artists who learn which friends to stop trusting, and the watcher who learns what he's been protecting. What's punk is that it puts a state functionary's conscience on trial without letting the state off. What's pedagogical is the machinery: files, informers, careers decided by a phone call. It makes a bureaucracy of fear feel real in ways a textbook never does.

A German high school teacher who is assigned to teach 'autocracy' runs a week-long classroom experiment: discipline, a uniform, a salute, a name. The class starts calling themselves The Wave, and within days the experiment stops being one. It is based on a real 1967 California classroom exercise and Todd Strasser's novel, moved to modern Germany.

Why it’s here: The film's whole argument is that a group of ordinary teenagers doesn't need history's villains to build a movement of belonging and exclusion, just a teacher, a uniform and a promise to be part of something. What's punk is that it is aimed at the audience's comfort: you are not immune. What's pedagogical is the experiment itself, which is easy to run, easy to discuss and hard to forget. It is the natural companion for How Fascism Works and They Thought They Were Free.