The Poisonwood Bible

In a poor neighborhood of Tehran, nine-year-old Ali loses his little sister Zahra's only pair of shoes. Their family can't afford another pair, and their father can barely cover the rent, so the two keep it secret and share Ali's sneakers, swapping them between her morning school shift and his afternoon one. Ali sees a chance to win a pair at a children's race, and everything comes down to it.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the scale: Majidi makes a film about poverty without a villain, a speech or a rescue, and trusts the children's point of view to carry all of it. Nothing in it is shouted. The shoes are the whole argument. The pedagogy is in that restraint. A young viewer sees what a missing pair of shoes costs a family, how kids shield their parents from shame, and how much dignity and care two siblings can hold at once. It is warm and funny and never sentimental, and it is an easy first film from outside the English-speaking world. Majidi worked inside Iran's censorship system, and the film keeps politics out of frame by design, so its critique of class comes through the situation and not through anything the characters say. Good for the whole family, with subtitles.

A Spanish film crew shooting a revisionist Christopher Columbus epic in Bolivia gets swept into the real Cochabamba Water War as their production and the uprising collide.

Why it’s here: A film crew shooting a revisionist Columbus epic on the cheap gets pulled into Bolivia's actual 2000 water-privatization uprising — the 500-years-apart parallel is the point, and it doesn't let the crew's good politics excuse their own exploitation of local labor.