The Shadow King

A documentary about the American war in Vietnam, made while the war was still being fought. Davis intercuts interviews with generals, officials, pilots, veterans, grieving Vietnamese families and ordinary Americans, setting the language of policy against what that policy did on the ground and at home.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the editing: Davis lets the war's architects talk at length, then cuts their words against a funeral, a bombed village or a cheering football crowd, and trusts the audience to feel the gap. The pedagogy is in how the film teaches viewers to hear the language of power, euphemism and abstraction included, while looking at what it covers up. Worth knowing that the juxtaposition is the argument, and General Westmoreland and others objected that their words were framed unfairly, so watch it as a persuasive documentary, not a neutral record.

Ten years after a peaceful socialist revolution in the United States, women are still squeezed out of the new order: no jobs, no safety, no say. The film follows several women's networks, among them a women's army, a pirate radio station and a white feminist paper, as they build their own tactics. Lizzie Borden shot it in New York over several years on a tiny budget, mixing documentary style with fiction.

Why it’s here: A feminist sci-fi by a first-time director with almost no money that asks what happens to a revolution after it wins. What's punk is that it was made outside the system it describes. What's pedagogical is how it shows coalitions fracturing over race and class, and how media decides what counts as news. Pairs with Parable of the Sower and Sister Outsider.