Best movies like Big Big World

In the wake of Israel's 2006 bombardment of Lebanon, a determined woman finds her way into the country convincing a taxi driver to take a risky journey around the scarred region in search of her sister and her son.

Caroline, a young waitress who seems to have bad taste in men, is on her way home one night when thugs attempt to rape her. Adam, the mysterious busboy who works at the same diner, helps fight off the assailants, and she begins a relationship with him -- but not all their fellow Minnesotans are happy for them. Meanwhile, the couple face their own difficulties when Caroline finds about Adam's past, including his unique health condition.

Uzak/Distant chronicles the numbing loneliness, longing, and isolation in the lives of two men who are consumed by their own problems. Istanbul photographer Mahmut reluctantly receives his relative Yusuf, but the mingling of their lives does little to alleviate their detachment.

Ali, Kwita, Omar and Boubker are street kids. The daily dose of glue sniffing represents their only escape from reality. Since they left Dib and his gang, they have been living on the portside of Casablanca. They live in constant fear of Dib's revenge. Ali wants to become a sailor - when he was living with his mother, a prostitute, he used to listen to a fairy tale about the sailor who discovered the miracle island with two suns. Instead of finding his island in the dream, Ali and his friends are confronted with Dib's gang. Matters are getting serious.

An Innuit hunter races his sled home with a fresh-caught halibut. This fish pervades the entire film, in real and imaginary form. Meanwhile, Axel tags fish in New York as a naturalist's gofer. He's happy there, but a messenger arrives to bring him to Arizona for his uncle's wedding. It's a ruse to get Axel into the family business. In Arizona, Axel meets two odd women: vivacious, needy, and plagued by neuroses and familial discord. He gets romantically involved with one, while the other, rich but depressed, plays accordion tunes to a gaggle of pet turtles

The struggles of a migrant Anatolian family to adapt to and survive in the very different conditions of urban Istanbul. A young woman moves with her husband and small child to her husband's family in Istanbul. Her son becomes ill and the doctor tells her that he will soon die if he doesn't get an operation. The family refuses to help her because they can't see anything wrong with the boy. What happens on a Eid morning becomes a breaking point for the family.

Dr. Matthew Clark is the head of a state institution for intellectually disabled children. Jean Hansen, a former music teacher anxious to give her life some meaning, joins the staff of the hospital. Jean, who tries to shelter the children with her love, suspiciously regards Dr. Clark's stern training methods. She becomes emotionally involved with 12-year-old Reuben Widdicombe, who has been abandoned by his divorced parents.

Kosmos is a thief and a miracle-worker. He appears one morning in a tiny, snowbound border village where he is welcomed with open arms – on account of arriving just in time to resuscitate a small boy who would otherwise have drowned.

An exiled magician finds an opportunity for revenge against his enemies muted when his daughter and the son of his chief enemy fall in love in this uniquely structured retelling of the 'The Tempest'.

A young British girl born and reared in India loses her neglectful parents in an earthquake. She is returned to England to live at her uncle's castle. Her uncle is very distant due to the loss of his wife ten years before. Neglected once again, she begins exploring the estate and discovers a garden that has been locked and neglected. Aided by one of the servants' boys, she begins restoring the garden, and eventually discovers some other secrets of the manor.

Young French officer Augustin Robert escorts artist Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis to Egypt during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. Napoleon sent de Paradis to record Egypt's great monuments and temples that are destroyed by French soldiers in acts of barbarism. During combat, Augustin and Jean-Michel are separated from their regiment, and they start wandering through the desert fighting for their life. In one of the canyons Augustin meets a leopard he names Simoom and a strange bond between them appears.

Bekir loves Uğur, who loves Zagor, who is about to get out of jail. An already tense love triangle is thrown into turmoil on a hot summer night, when Zagor kills someone, and Uğur disappears.

Having a self-absorbed New Age mother and an estranged father has meant 15-year-old Ellis Whitman has grown up relying on an unconventional guardian: a goat-trekking, marijuana-growing sage called 'Goat Man'. When Ellis decides to leave the alternative ways of his desert homestead for a stuffy East Coast prep school, major changes are in store.

On her wedding night, a young woman conceives a child during an hallucinatory encounter. Several years later, as her friends and family begin to behave strangely, she pieces together clues that lead to one conclusion...her son is the Antichrist

Suffering from her mother's recent suicide, a delusional young girl falls for an alluring Goth, against the objections of a life-size talking muslin doll. The Melancholy Fantastic is a psychological thriller set during the holidays.

When their mother disappears, a group of siblings are forced to fend for themselves, and make their way on their own. They eventually meet their grandmother, a loner who is reluctant to take them in.

When an aging matriarch starts showing signs of dementia, her dysfunctional family in Istanbul must navigate a minefield of unresolved issues to care for her.

A family battles against the odds to stay together when small lies grow into an extravagant cover-up. In order to avoid hardship and responsibilities that would otherwise be impossible to endure, the family chooses to ignore the truth, not to see, hear or talk about it. But does playing “Three Monkeys” invalidate the truth of its existence?

Three people, three extraordinary stories. All lived out within a hundred London streets.

In a small, poor village leaning over high rocky mountains, the villagers are simple and diligent people who struggle to cope with a harsh nature. They earn their living off the earth and a few animals they feed. Fathers always prefer one of their sons. Mothers command their daughters ruthlessly. Ömer, the son of the imam, wishes hopelessly for the death of his father. When he understands that wishful thinking does not have any concrete results, he begins to search for childish ways to kill his father. Yakup is in love with his teacher, and one day after seeing his father spying on the teacher he dreams too, like Ömer, of killing his father. Yıldız studies and tries to manage the household chores imposed by her mother. She learns with irritation about the secrets of the relationship between men and women.

Mehmet, a young Turkish man newly migrated from the village Tire, takes a job searching for water leaks below the surface of the streets of Istanbul. Due to a strange set of events, he is mistaken for a Kurd, imprisoned, and brutally beaten. Upon his release a week later, he becomes an outcast marked as a Kurd, losing his apartment, his job, and eventually his girl friend, Arzu. When a Kurdish friend, Berzan is killed in a street protest triggered by a hunger strike, Mehmet takes a trek to return the body to Berzan's home village near the Iraqi border, and learns why so many Kurds are refugees.

After several years of numbly mourning his parents death, 26 year old Selim takes a chance on the US lottery for passports and wins. He decides to sell the family olive grove to raise enough money to live in Manhattan and to break all roots to Turkey, leaving his girlfriend behind. When Selim's aged grand uncle, Nasuhi returns from Russia after 58 years he asks Selim to visit with him the olive grove of his youth. Before they depart, Nasuhi finds a beaten Russian girl, Olga who was robbed when she tried to sell herself to raise money to continue her own search for her sea faring father.

This is a movie within a movie, about a director, Muzaffer, who goes back to his hometown to make a film using a cast of local people (based on the director Ceylan's first feature, Kasaba). While Muzaffer is around, his mother complains about simple health problems, his father is in a legal fight against the government for his land, his cousin leaves his job to help Muzaffer who promises to find him work in Istanbul, and his little cousin Ali tries to carry an egg in his pocket for forty days so that he'll get the watch of his dreams. In the meantime, they form the cast for Muzaffer's movie as well.

The story takes place in Harbiye town of Antakya just before the 1960 military coup d'etat. The economic and political crisis of those days are reflected by the both funny and sad story of a family. The story is told from the eyes of Cemal. Now a famous painter, Cemal goes back to his hometown years later and remembers his childhood. In those days Cemal's father and uncle, member of rival political parties, are in a continious struggle with each other. The film depicts this absurd struggle and the strange stories of people in Harbiye together with the lyric story of the famous waterfall of the town.

A man is forced to confront his past after he loses everything in an accident. Mustafa is a successful business man living a seemingly great life with his family when an accident takes it all away from him and leaves him with many questions and a cab driver, Fikret, who can answer it all. Mustafa is due to get a lot more than what he bargained for, however, as his interrogations take him to long-forgotten childhood memories and force him to see his formerly perfect life from a very different perspective.

During the period of the Wealth Tax, where many non-Muslims in Turkey were forced to pay higher taxes, often in an arbitrary and unrealistic way. Nimet and Durmuş migrate from Niğde to Istanbul and take shelter with Durmuş's friend Bekir, who finds Durmuş a job at the inn. However, making a living by serving as a porter is not in line with Durmuş's ambitions. He wants everything Halit Bey has, the inn owner. Halit Bey begins to dispose of his property in order to pay the tax stipulated to his beloved wife Nora, who was treated in a nursing home. Wealth Tax has begun to affect everyone's destiny.

The film is set in present-day Istanbul. Selim is a shop owner in his early forties. He sells clothing for men in his shop situated in one of the back streets of Istanbul. Selim is a family man who has devoted his life to his home and his work. He lives with his wife Ayla, his six-year-old daughter Esma and his old father in a simple flat in and old, modest neighbourhood. He has warm relations with his family. He is an affectionate father. One of his neighbours, a young widow named Nihal tries to seduce Selim, but her flirtation leaves him cold. Selim is known for his honesty and integrity among his family and friends. He is a careful spender. As a little child, he has learned that money is not easily earned. He has no tolerance for petty "trickery" met in daily life. One day, Selim finds a bag full of dollar bills (approximately 500,000$) in a cab. From that day on, Selim finds himself in a bewildered state with a bag full of money on his hands.

The lonely proprietor of a small hotel in a provincial Turkish town develops a passion for a departed guest.

A retired teacher who returns to Istanbul after years away, Nazim tries to reacquaint himself with his hometown, which has changed significantly. While waiting for his pension to begin, Nazim takes a temporary job as a taxi driver and frequently ends up in the seedier parts of the city. …

Produced, written and directed by Yılmaz Güney within his own personal experiences of capital offense, he dedicates Duvar to male teenagers aged 13 to 19 living behind the bars under diabolical treatments. These teenagers get barbaric corporal punishments, injurious harrows, tortures and sexual abuses just for taking the responsibility of their destiny on a wrong turn.

Fact-based story about a Pasadena cab driver who picks up what he believes is a routine fare, an elderly woman on her way to a funeral. However, the wealthy woman is soon is insisting that the cabbie drive her on a cross-country trip that ends up entailing 3100 miles and ending in Vancouver. Initially contentious, the two eventually find a reluctant friendship growing.

Man was made to be happy for simple reasons and unhappy for even simpler ones – just as he is born for simple reasons and dies for even simpler ones... Isa and Bahar are two lonely figures dragged through the ever-changing climate of their inner selves in pursuit of a happiness that no longer belongs to them.

Mahsun Supertitiz is an unemployed homeless man who steals cars at night so that he can sleep in a heated place during the winter. Mahsun lives in Rumelihisar, an old section of Istanbul, and makes ends meet by getting the local fishermen to help him. Mahsun loves the cars he robs, cleans and polishes them, and drives them through the streets of Rumelihisar during the daytime.

Poet Yusuf (35-38) returns to his childhood hometown, which he hadn't visited for years, upon his mother's death. He is faced with a neglected, crumbling house. Ayla, a young girl (17-19) awaits him there. Yusuf has been unaware of the existence of this distant relation who had been living with his mother for five years; He stays by his dead mother's bedside for a while on the morning of his return...

Turkish director Ali Vatansever weighs the human cost of politically motivated urban renewal in his achingly resonant second feature, about a young couple forced to compromise their ideals and work for the very industry encroaching on their Istanbul neighbourhood, in order to keep up with the rent.