Politics Bucket List

Experience the dystopian classic by George Orwell

Ava DuVernay on the loophole in the 13th Amendment and mass incarceration.

A Russian primary-school teacher films his own classroom as the war turns it into a recruiting office.

A Chinese glass company reopens a shut GM plant in Ohio, and neither side understands the other.

A Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist film the demolition of Masafer Yatta over five years.

The 2008 financial crisis explained by the people who caused it, narrated by Matt Damon.

An Afghan taxi driver dies in American custody at Bagram, and Alex Gibney follows the policy that killed him.

The San Francisco supervisor, his election, his murder and the candlelight march that followed.

Barbara Kopple returns to labour: the Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Austin, Minnesota, and the union that split over it.

Peter Davis on Vietnam, cutting between the men who ordered the war and the people it was fought on.

The forced relocation of Navajo families from Big Mountain, narrated by Martin Sheen.

The first of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight films, made to explain to conscripts what they were being sent into.

The First Lady and delegate, from Hyde Park to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The 1989 American invasion of Panama and the civilian casualties the networks did not show.

Lee Grant on the farms, factories and welfare hotels of the Reagan recession.

Dick Cheney assembles the modern American presidency in the background of every frame.

Stone's three-hour portrait of a president recording himself into the ground.

Margaret Thatcher in old age, remembering the rise; Streep won her third Oscar for it.

A widow, a dead lawyer and martial-law Poland; the first film written with Piesiewicz.

Three lives branch from whether a man catches a train; shelved by the censors for six years.

How American food is made, from chicken houses to corn subsidies.

Thirty days of McDonald's and a liver like pate.

Al Gore's slideshow on climate change; the cherry picker up the CO2 graph.

A Kentucky coal strike in 1973, filmed from the picket line; Barbara Kopple's Oscar.

Sorkin's Bartlet administration and the walk-and-talk; the fantasy of competent government.

Capra's idealist senator filibusters for 23 hours against a corrupt machine.

An island rises between two nations and both immediately claim it.

Michelle Obama from the South Side of Chicago to the White House.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his son about being Black in America; a letter in the tradition of Baldwin.

From Detroit Red to Mecca, told to Alex Haley in the year before his assassination.