Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

1902, the Sea Islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coast. Three generations of Gullah women gather for a last day together before part of the family migrates north to the mainland, weighing what they carry from their African ancestors against what the future is calling them toward.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the form: Julie Dash refused the pacing, plot and explanatory voiceover a Hollywood period drama expects, and built a film from Gullah language, ritual and memory instead, narrated partly by an unborn child. The pedagogy is in what that costs and gives you. It teaches a viewer to read a culture on its own terms, and puts the question of what a family keeps and what it lets go at the center rather than treating it as backdrop. It is slow and non-linear by design, so it rewards a second watch and a conversation afterward more than a casual first one.

In the summer of 1969, 300,000 people went to Harlem's Mount Morris Park for the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of free concerts with Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson and others. The footage sat in a basement for fifty years. Questlove cuts it together with interviews with the people who were there. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film recovers a piece of Black history that the mainstream skipped while Woodstock got the myth. What's punk is the recovery: the question of who decides which summer gets remembered. What's pedagogical is the way it ties music to the politics of the year, from the Panthers to the moon landing. It sits next to I Am Not Your Negro and Hale County in the catalog's picks.