This publication’s door is open to anyone who listens, however this space does center Black voices, if that wasn’t already clear.
So you’d think I’d kick things off by reviewing a Spike Lee joint. Maybe School Daze. Maybe Chi-Raq. Maybe something streaming now that turns every scene into a tweet waiting to happen.
But nah.
I don’t really like Spike Lee movies.
(Malcolm X? Masterpiece. Full stop. But the rest? Too loud. Too proud. Too damn sure of itself.)
I don’t dislike them the way some folks hated the Star Wars sequels with the Black and Asian characters as poster examples of woke.
I dislike them the way Star Wars fans hate those sequels: not because of who was in them, but because the mystery got replaced with messaging. Everything became a lesson. Every character a symbol. Every beat built to make a point.
And I’m tired of movies that treat me like I need a syllabus.
That’s why I want to talk about The Penguin Lessons — the movie. Not the memoir. The film. A quiet little oddity that came and went with barely a ripple.
But it did something that most movies today are too scared to do.
It whispered.
And when you watch closely, that whisper becomes a scream. Not a Twitter thread. Not a sermon. Not a viral soundbite.
A scream of grief, of control, of erasure.
And somehow, that scream comes through a penguin in a blazer.
The Penguin Didn’t Talk. That’s Why They Loved Him.
The movie doesn’t hand-hold. Doesn’t narrate every beat. Set in 1970s Argentina, during a real dictatorship, it never once explains the political climate. No dates on screen. No character standing in for the audience.
It just lets you sit in it.
Michael (played by Steve Coogan) is a British teacher in an elite boarding school. He finds a penguin on a beach, nearly dead from an oil spill. He smuggles it back into Argentina and into the school.
That’s the plot. But that’s not the story.
The penguin becomes more than a pet. It becomes a comfort object, a mascot, a soul-softener in a place where hierarchy and silence run deep.
No one asks the penguin how it feels.
But they all feel better because it’s there.
Everything’s a Message Now. Nobody’s Listening.
Today, movies are built for discourse. Every line is a tweet. Every shot pre-memed. Directors scared of being misunderstood now explain everything. Writers flatten characters into archetypes so they’ll pass the vibe check.
And subtle films? They get labeled boring. Or worse: problematic.
But The Penguin Lessons doesn’t care what you think.
It trusts you.
Trusts you to notice what isn’t said. To sit with the discomfort. To hear the echoes in the silences. That’s not just art.
That’s respect.
They Used to Let Movies Breathe
The culture war has turned movies into landmines. Right-wing critics yell “woke” anytime they see a Black woman with dialogue. Liberals respond with scripts that sound like they were written by HR departments.
Everyone’s yelling.
Meanwhile, The Penguin Lessons sits in the corner, sipping maté and letting you watch a penguin walk across a courtyard for two full minutes. No music. No narration. Just footsteps.
I felt more from that than most Oscar winners this year.
Because it gave me space.
This Is How You Rebuke Fascism Without Saying “Fascism”
The dictatorship looms, but nobody explains it. That’s the power of this film.
There’s a maid named Sofía, played quietly and devastatingly by a young Argentine actress. She disappears. Gone. Kidnapped. No resolution.
Her grandmother, María, waits.
Others vanish too. We’re told it, softly, in a passing line. And again in the closing credits: Over 30,000 Argentines disappeared during the military regime.
The movie never raises its voice.
It doesn’t have to.
Because we’ve seen this before. And we’re seeing it again.
All across the world, people are disappearing and not just physically, but algorithmically. Silenced. Shadowbanned. Flattened.
The state doesn’t need a boot when it has a mute button.
The Penguin Lessons understood that.
He’s a symbol. But not the kind that gets turned into merch.
Juan Salvador (that’s his name) becomes the perfect performer in a fascist system: silent, obedient, soothing.
Everyone loves him.
But here’s the deeper cut:
He isn’t just a penguin. He’s a stand-in for the displaced—for Indigenous peoples, for Afro-descendants, for anyone "rescued" into captivity and paraded as proof of progress.
They clean him up. They smuggle him across borders. They put him in a blazer and watch as he becomes the school mascot. A curiosity. A comfort. An exotic they can control.
He performs peace while hiding the violence that brought him there. He soothes their nerves while never speaking a word.
He never gets his land back. Never sees the sea again. Never lives free.
Until he dies.
Offscreen.
Unremarked.
He just disappears.
Like Sofía. Like the others.
Like so many cultures deemed too wild, too foreign, too inconvenient to remember.
Like nuance.
If You Know, You Know
This is a film for people who still listen. People who remember when movies made you lean in, not scroll away. People who understand that sometimes the loudest thing a story can do… is shut the hell up.
If you felt this, you already in.
If you didn’t? You might still be looking for the message.
If you still believe in stories that whisper, not scream pull up a chair. XVOA’s UrbanSoulNation makes space for that.
$8 a month says quiet stories still matter. Founders keep this soul train moving.
Powerful!
The description made me tear up