Whoever You Are

A sixteen-year-old chasing a missing-billionaire mystery with her best friend has to navigate love, friendship, and grief while living inside an unrelenting spiral of intrusive thoughts. Adapted from John Green's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in depicting intrusive thoughts from the inside without turning them into a redemption arc or a clean cure — Aza's experience isn't resolved, it's managed, imperfectly, alongside friendship and love. Pedagogical in normalizing that living with a mental health condition is compatible with a full life, not a tragedy to overcome.

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.