This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century

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.

On a distant planet, giant blue Draags keep tiny humans, called Oms, as pets. One Om, Terr, escapes with a stolen learning device and teaches himself to read. The Oms organize in the wild and the Draags have to decide what to do. Animated by Roland Topor and made in Czechoslovakia, it won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1973.

Why it’s here: The film turns a pet-and-owner story into an allegory of how a ruling class sees the people it keeps. What's punk is that the hero's weapon is literacy and the story is about who gets to learn. What's pedagogical is how easily it can be read as slavery, colonialism or cold-war Czechoslovakia, so a class can argue which. Pairs with Animal Farm, The Giver and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Note: strange, surreal and slow in places, with some nudity and a violent first act; best for older teens and adults.