Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

A 1950 New Mexico zinc miners' strike, reenacted by the real Mexican-American families who lived it, made by a blacklisted writer, producer, and director during the height of the Red Scare.

Why it’s here: Made by three men the Hollywood blacklist had already ended the careers of, using real miners and their families as the cast — the labor politics on screen and the circumstances of the film's own making are the same argument, not two separate things.

In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican-American teenage loners strike up a friendship that cracks open everything one of them has spent years keeping carefully closed off — including who he is. Adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in its tenderness rather than its edge — a bilingual, bicultural, queer coming-of-age story that doesn't need trauma to justify its own gentleness. Pedagogical in showing how friendship can crack open a kid who's spent years protecting himself by staying closed.