The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

Every year about 1,000 Texas high school boys spend a week building a fake government, with parties, campaigns and elections. The directors followed four of them, including a Black teen who is the first to win a seat and a conservative strategist who learns to play the game. A funny and unsettling look at how people learn to win power.

Why it’s here: The film makes a civics class feel like a Lord of the Flies preview. What's punk is how fast a made-up democracy turns into one that plays dirty. What's pedagogical is the way it lets students see rhetoric, tactics and compromise play out among peers. Pairs with How Democracies Die and the Fascism bundle. Note: it's boys-only by program design, and the American Legion runs the program, which the film shows with some irony.

In the early 1970s, a ramshackle summer camp for teenagers with disabilities near Woodstock, Camp Jened, ran on hippie rules: no adults in charge of the kids' lives. The campers, among them co-director James LeBrecht and the future activist Judy Heumann, went on to organize the sit-ins and protests that helped win the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was produced for Netflix and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film shows that a movement can begin as a summer. What's punk is that the people it follows organize without asking permission, and refuse to be treated as objects of pity. What's pedagogical is the through-line from a place where kids ran their own lives to a federal law that changed what was possible. It's a rare entry on disability and civil rights, and a natural fit for DoCR's self-organization principle.