The Years

Agnès Varda, in her late eighties, and the street artist JR road-trip across rural France in a photo-booth truck, printing enormous portraits of the people they meet, such as a goat farmer, miners' families and dockworkers' wives, and pasting them on barns, shipping containers and condemned houses. It is a documentary about what happens when an artist treats an ordinary person's face as the monument. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film argues that who gets a monument is a political choice, then spends ninety minutes making the people history usually skips into one. What's punk is the DIY mobility and the refusal of the gallery; what's pedagogical is the lesson that attention is a form of respect and art can be a community act. It's also unusually joyful, which is its own kind of resistance.

Laurent Amédéo leads 1,100 workers at the Perrin plant — a facility that is profitable, whose multinational parent company has decided to close anyway. Stéphane Brizé shoots En guerre with the grain and rhythm of a documentary: non-professional actors in most roles, a handheld camera that can't find a comfortable distance, meetings that go nowhere for a very long time. Vincent Lindon is the union spokesperson who has to translate collective fury into procedure and back again, day after day. The film covers one stretch of a fight that most films would compress into a montage — the press conferences, the back-channel negotiations, the vote counts, the waiting.

Why it’s here: Brizé makes you sit in the room where a decision is being made about other people's lives by people who will never meet them. What's punk about En guerre is the refusal to let that feel abstract — the camera stays at plant-gate level, in the meeting room, on Laurent's face when the call comes in. What's pedagogical is the film's insistence on duration: you feel what it costs to keep a collective together when the institution on the other side is patient and the workers are not. For anyone who has been told that workers in France are just wired differently, that solidarity at this scale isn't something available to us — this film shows the material conditions that make it possible. And it shows what it costs even there.