Tools for Conviviality

A documentary on the September 1971 uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in New York, when about 1,300 incarcerated men took over the prison to demand basic rights, and the state's assault that ended it killed 39 men, prisoners and hostages alike. Built from archival footage and testimony from survivors. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film puts the people who lived it back in charge of the story, and the story is how a state answers a list of demands. What's punk is the demands themselves: showers, food, medical care, the right to be treated as human. What's pedagogical is the aftermath, the gap between what officials said happened and what survivors and records show. It's a lesson in how to read an official account.

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.