Best movies like A House Built on Water

Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.

Paul Steward, editor of a scientific journal, is a failed husband, a failed father, he considers his entire life a failure. His decision is made, there's only one escape: to kill his family and himself. Professional interviews, trips on public transport, discussions with friends... A normal yet oppressive day unfolds.

Gheysar returns home to find that his young sister has committed suicide and his older brother Farman got killed. When he finds that Aghmangol brothers are behind all of this decides to get revenge. His uncle advised him not to go after revenge but he begins to pursue them killing them one by one. Finally, when killing the last brother he himself is getting killed by the police.

An examination of the work and lives of actresses in the Iranian film industry prior to the 1979 revolution, featuring myriad interviews and rare film clips.

The story revolves around a blind boy named Mohammed who is released from his special school in Tehran for summer vacation. His father, shamed and burdened by Mohammed's blindness, arrives late to pick him up and then tries to convince the headmaster to keep Mohammed over the summer. The headmaster refuses, so Mohammed's father eventually takes him home.

a film about how attitude dissimilar family against abortion .....

Ivan Locke has worked hard to craft a good life for himself. Tonight, that life will collapse around him. On the eve of the biggest challenge of his career, Ivan receives a phone call that sets in motion a series of events that will unravel his family, job, and soul.

Forced out of their apartment due to dangerous works on a neighboring building, Emad and Rana move into a new flat in the center of Tehran. An incident linked to the previous tenant will dramatically change the young couple’s life.

A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.

A yellow cab is driving through the vibrant and colourful streets of Tehran. Very diverse passengers enter the taxi, each candidly expressing their views while being interviewed by the driver who is no one else but the director Jafar Panahi himself. His camera placed on the dashboard of his mobile film studio captures the spirit of Iranian society through this comedic and dramatic drive…

After their father dies, a family of five are forced to survive on their own in a Kurdish village on the border of Iran and Iraq. Matters are made worse when 12 year old Ayoub, the new head of the family, is told that his handicapped brother, Madi, needs an immediate operation in order to remain alive. This heartbreaking tale shows the lengths to which a family will go in order to survive in the harshest of conditions, where even the horses are fed liquor in order to work.

A Tehran taxi driver becomes the impromptu protector of a desperate young pregnant woman after he rushes her to hospital, in this delicate, deceptively small-scale drama from award-winning Iranian director Reza Mirkarimi.

A sensation when released in 1999 in Iran, Two Women charts the lives of two promising architecture students over the course of the first turbulent years of the Islamic Republic. Tahimine Milani creates this scathing portrait of those traditions - aided by official indifference - which conspire to trap women and stop them from realizing their full potential; the inclusion of frank depictions of domestic violence was hailed by many as a breakthrough in dealing with a long taboo subject.

Rita, a middle aged New York City homemaker, finds herself in an emotional crisis which forces her to re-examine her life, as well as her relationships with her mother, her eye doctor husband, her alienated daughter and estranged son.

When an ostrich-rancher focuses on replacing his daughter's hearing aid, which breaks right before crucial exams, everything changes for a struggling rural family in Iran. Karim motorbikes into a world alien to him - incredibly hectic Tehran, where sudden opportunities for independence, thrill and challenge him. But his honor and honesty, plus traditional authority over his inventive clan, are tested, as he stumbles among vast cultural and economic gaps between his village nestled in the desert, and a throbbing international metropolis.

Japan and Iran are not in close relationship. More than 4 centuries ago, however, Persian carpets were used in the festival of Takayama, a historic city in mountainous area of Honsyu. A man planned to resume the carpet in the festival, and asked Kinue, a Persian carpet designer, to design it. Kinue's husband, Makoto, is a carpet importer. They send the design to Iran to weave the carpet. But just before Makoto goes to Iran to receive the carpet, Kinue dies of a traffic accident. A month before the festival, Makoto went to Isphahan, Iran, to receive the carpet. He brings his daughter Sakura, who does not open her heart after she lost her mother. To surprise, the carpet production has not even started. It will take 3 months from the start. For Makoto it means he betrays not only the festival planners but also his late wife.

The Glass Agency is the story of a war veteran living in post war Iran. It depicts veterans who are suffering from social problems after the war. Society does not understand them and the standard social norms are not in harmony with their personalities.

Ali and his father go from their poor neighborhood in the outskirts of the city to a hospital so that Ali's father can be treated for his sickness. However since they have no money, Ali starts to work for Dr. Sameri who deals in blood.

Tells the story of seven Iranian transgender individuals living in Tehran who live pieces of their own lives on the screen.

Khosro, a pop singer, lives a hectic life with his wife Tina and their son Moez. His life is further complicated when he begins a love affair with a female fan. A terrible event ensues obliging the lovers to each recount their side of the story in pursuit of the truth.

A young-wife desperate to give her beloved comatose and dying husband a child considers her only option: cloning. Giving birth to a son fulfills her dream of having a family. But the arrival of the baby awakens a supernatural presence unleashing unexpected results. The family must make an impossible choice and live with a secret forever. (DCIFF)

Golrokh, an Iranian author, struggles to settle her husband's debts caused by a business partner who left him to bear the consequences.

Marzieh is a young female actress living in Tehran. The authorities ban her theatre work and, like all young people in Iran, she is forced to lead a secret life in order to express herself artistically. At an underground rave, she meets Iranian born Saman, now an Australian citizen, who offers her a way out of her country and the possibility of living without fear.

Death surrounds Bahman, a director who hasn't made a film in 24 years (he can't get past the censors). He's working on a documentary, for Japanese TV, on Iranian burial practices. On the anniversary of his wife's death, a hitchhiker tells him a story of spousal abuse and infant mortality, he discovers that someone has been buried in his plot next to his wife, and he needs the help of his attorney, a well-connected fixer. He dreams of death, even as he investigates it for his film. His niece's husband, a well-known writer, fails to return home; he searches hospitals for an unclaimed body. His heart disease is flaring up. Is he prepared for death? Is that all that's left?

Yasaman Pakravan, a wealthy woman, has paid his husband, Sadegh, 10 Million Tomans to convince him of divorcing her. However, Sadegh continues to harass her and ask her for more until she is forced to hire a lawyer, Ehsan Daneshvar, to make her divorce legal. But before they can meet ...

According to what his father, Farman who is a powerful man of his times, always wants, Fereydoon is grown up as a gentle young boy. However, his relatives call him a ‘baby dandy’, so that his uncle does not consent to marry Shirin, his daughter, to Fereydoon. His uncle is waiting for Ismael to be released from the prison, then he would get his daughter married to him; although this is against Shirin’s wish. Under such a condition, there remains only one choice for Fereydoon, and that is to turn himself to a ‘ruffian’. By pretending to be a ruffian, Fereydoon successfully overcomes his sinister competitor and marries his beloved girl.

A free adaptation from Godard's Breathless that follows Amir, a foul guy who has killed a man in Abadan. He returns to Tehran and continuing his misdeeds trying to convince his girlfriend Zarry to escape with him to the south of Iran.

A director of a television series on the history of cinema, who has been grappling with the screenplay of his first feature film, receives an assignment to oversee the installation of a television relay station in a remote region of Zahedan province, near the Afghanistan border. He has already hired Turkoman tribespeople for his film and selected his filming location. Meanwhile his wife, who is working on her Ph.D. dissertation about the Mongol invasion of Iran, attempts to dissuade him from accepting the assignment. One night, while working on his history of the cinema series, the director fantasizes a diagetic world that consists of clever juxtapositions of his different worlds: the history of cinema, the history of the mongol invasion, his own film idea and his imminent assignment to the desert.

Prince Ehtejab, one of the last remaining heirs of the Qajar royal family, is suffering from tuberculosis, which he knows is fatal. He spends his last days alone in the magnificent rooms of his wintry palace, from where he recollects the glory days of his ancestors as well as days of degradation. Among the latter are the gruesome manner in which his cruel grandfather murdered his mother and brother, and the way that he himself caused the death of his wife.

Bahram Farzaneh is a writer who has long been unable to write a story. Suddenly, due to a car accident, a song is repeated in his mind that brings him to dance. The same thing stirred up the passion for writing.

A Tehran mullah-in-training struggles to take care of his ailing wife and their children in this profoundly moving melodrama. A film of near-universal appeal, it puts a human face on Iran's Muslim clergy with its unusual tale of a man forced by hardship to become a better husband and father. Seyed Reza has just moved with his family to Tehran so he can study the Koran, and he relies on his lovely wife Zahra to look after their two young children and weave the intricate rugs that earn them a living. But one evening Zahra collapses and is taken to the hospital, where she's diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Scarcely able to process the tragedy, Seyed is left to cook, change diapers, walk his daughter to school and take his toddler son with him to his classes, where peers and elders treat him with scorn. But Seyed eventually learns to cope, his prayers and devotional studies taking on deeper meaning as he attends to the hard nightly work of rug weaving, getting through with a heavy ...

Taher Mohebi is a well-known writer who, after witnessing a violent murder, breaks down and spends three years in a mental institution. After release he is told that things are just as they were before, but his relentless hallucinations make him want to return to the institution.

An Iranian girl marries a man who has been loved by a wich- daughter of a jin, who tries to frighten the poor woman by showing herself in evil ways that make the poor woman go unconscious several times and her sister convinces the poor woman's husband to divorce her.

An elderly owner of a tomato farm and sauce factory, after his wife's death, falls in love with one of the workers of the factory endangering his relationship with his daughters and in-laws. While everybody in the big family persuades the old man to abandon the relationship with the poor girl, the old man makes his final choice of love.

Based on a short story by Houshang Golshiri, this film centers on mysterious and chilling events that take place in a village. A group of superstitious inhabitants have erected a scarecrow for protection but soon find themselves terrorized by it. Made at the end of the Shah’s reign, the film offers a metaphorical reflection on power relations — how people create their own idols who turn around to terrorize them.