Best movies like Bird of Paradise

How do you reconcile a commitment to non-violence when faced with violence? Why do the poor often seem happier than the rich? Must a society lose its traditions in order to move into the future? These are some of the questions posed to His Holiness the Dalai Lama by filmmaker and explorer Rick Ray. Ray examines some of the fundamental questions of our time by weaving together observations from his own journeys throughout India and the Middle East, and the wisdom of an extraordinary spiritual leader. This is his story, as told and filmed by Rick Ray during a private visit to his monastery in Dharamsala, India over the course of several months. Also included is rare historical footage as well as footage supplied by individuals who at great personal risk, filmed with hidden cameras within Tibet.

Set in ancient China, Zeng Jing is a skilled assassin who finds herself in possession of a mystical Buddhist monk's remains. She begins a quest to return the remains to its rightful resting place, and thus places herself in mortal danger because a team of assassins is in a deadly pursuit to possess the remains which holds an ancient power-wielding secret.

The story is set in Cambodia in the years following WWI. Evil Count Mazovia (Roy D'Arcy) has come into possession of the secret methods by which men can be transformed into walking zombies and uses these unholy powers to create a race of slave laborers. An expedition is sent to the ruins of Angkor Wat, in hopes of ending Mazovia's activities once and for all. Unfortunately, Armand (Dean Jagger), one of the members of the expedition, has his own agenda.

The Tibetans refer to the Dalai Lama as 'Kundun', which means 'The Presence'. He was forced to escape from his native home, Tibet, when communist China invaded and enforced an oppressive regime upon the peaceful nation. The Dalai Lama escaped to India in 1959 and has been living in exile in Dharamsala ever since.

Annie, the mistress of a middle-aged financier, accompanies him on a trip to Hong Kong. When his business interests collapse Annie ends up destitute. She is befriended by a group of socialites and begins her rite of passage in their world.

A mysterious and immortal Tibetan kung fu master, who has spent the last 60 years traveling around the world protecting the ancient Scroll of the Ultimate, mentors a selfish street kid in the ancient intricacies of kung fu.

A con man who is on the run from law enforcement in the U.S. travels to Cambodia to collect his share in an insurance scam but discovers more than he bargained for.

A homely maid and a scarred ex-GI meet at the cottage where she works and where he was to spend his honeymoon prior to his accident. The two develop a bond and agree to marry, more out of loneliness than love. The romantic spirit of the cottage, however, overtakes them. They soon begin to look beautiful to each other, but no one else.

English aristocrat Lara Croft is skilled in hand-to-hand combat and in the middle of a battle with a secret society. The shapely archaeologist moonlights as a tomb raider to recover lost antiquities and meets her match in the evil Powell, who's in search of a powerful relic.

Suffering from acute kidney failure, Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave—the birthplace of his first life.

Peyangki is a dreamy and solitary eight-year-old monk living in Laya, a Bhutanese village perched high in the Himalayas. Soon the world will come to him: the village is about to be connected to electricity, and the first television will flicker on before Peyangki's eyes.

A love story situated in the Himalayas. A Buddhist monk can't choose between life and the way of the Buddha.

A young author with an incurable illness wishes to return to Angkor Wat to spend his final days, but his wife remains in Phnom Penh, sending a young cousin to go instead. While his wife makes plans to remarry, the young man and cousin fall in love.

Buddhist monks open up about the joys and challenges of living out the precepts of the Buddha as a full-time vocation. Controversies swirling within modern monastic Buddhism are examined, from celibacy and the role of women to racism and concerns about the environment.

One evening, Amra, a young Algerian living in France, accidentally runs over a pedestrian. Riddled with guilt and the certainty that she will lose her French identity papers, Amra is miraculously proved innocent by Angélique, a beautiful redhead who is as open and without any hang-ups as Amra is unsociable and introverted. The two young women become friends, but then Angélique's attitude becomes increasingly strange, indeed, even troubling...

A hairdresser forwards a passionate love letter to her widowed mother.

In 2014, Tsai Ming-Liang was invited to make a film for the MarseilleFID, Marseille International Film Festival. Since he was not familiar with Marseille, he decided to make a film as tourist, capturing the beautiful Mediterranean sunshine in the late summer of that year. He also invited famous French actor, Denis Lavant, to appear alongside Lee Kang-Sheng playing Xuanzang. "Journey to the West" was invited to be the opening short film at the Berlin International Film Festival the same year.

The film is about reincarnation and takes place in a purgatory where the dead still have human form and the world around them looks the same as the living world. However, the people living in this purgatory start to develop animal instincts. Gene, a retiree vacationing in Baja, is learning the instincts of a spider through his dreams and stumbles upon a woman who is destined to be reborn as a caterpillar/moth. The film explores a world where human and animal intertwine as one.

In the valleys of the Himalayas, an orphan boy saves a Bengal tiger cub from the ruthless poachers who killed the tiger's mother. Together they set out in the Himalayan mountains to the Taktsang monastery in Bhutan known as "The Tiger's Nest" where Buddhist monks took refuge after the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet and protect the big cats. A new great film for the whole family that talks about the importance of defending animals through the story of the friendship between two orphans, a tiger cub and a child, in a tale of brotherhood and the discovery of life.

Basically a travelogue featuring footage of Angkor Wat (in Cambodia) shot by a couple of explorers in the WWI years, with additional footage shot on a set in Hollywood by George M. Merrick.

Simon Aubert runs his entire life on lies. An executive at an aviation company, he lies about everything… Simon’s self-serving lies are so abundant that the universe (governed by a handful of Buddhist monks, it seems) decides to right a wrong by teaching him a lesson and making all of the lies reality on the eve of his company’s crucial meeting with a Russian businessman that Simon absolutely needs to impress in order to prevent the closure of the small-town plant where his twin brother Phil works.

From the co-founder of Slamdance comes the story of a young man who returns home from a trip abroad to confront not just his peculiar family and friends, but also a pair of Colombian jewel thieves and a roving gang of Iowa kickboxers, culminating in a showdown at Carhenge. A seminal movie in the history of independent film, "Omaha: The Movie" was the film that spearheaded the birth of the Slamdance Film Festival.

Amy Bradford, the beautiful small town veterinarian and crime scene investigator, just lost her best friend in a car accident. It seems like the last straw in a series of pain and tragedy that has her questioning her Christian faith and her future. When she learns her friend's death was actually a murder, she must set aside her grief and find the strength to solve the crime, and thwart a cyber-attack on the secret government facility where her dad works. There's a handsome detective in town who may be her true love, or the killer.

An art thief tries to double cross his gangster boss.

Kingdom of Bhutan, 2006. Modernization has finally arrived. Bhutan becomes the last country in the world to connect to the internet and television, and now the biggest change of all: democracy. To teach the people how to vote, the authorities organize a mock election, but the locals seem unconvinced. Travelling to rural Bhutan where religion is more popular than politics, the election supervisor discovers that a monk is planning a mysterious ceremony for the election day.

Thirty years on from the 1984 Union Carbide plant malfunction, the consequences of which are tragically ongoing, A Prayer for Rain is the powerful and moving story of the Bhopal tragedy, one of the great corporate and environmental scandals of the last half-century. It dramatises the dependence of the local community on the chemical plant that will eventually cause catastrophe, and the series of oversights that led to an event that stands as a benchmark for corporate irresponsibility in the developing world.

Story of four young monks left alone in their remote monastery in Myanmar. Shot entirely in newly-opened Myanmar with non-actors, the film bridges spirit, cinema, and traditional Burmese storytelling to open a view onto an unseen world.

In Madrid at the time of the Inquisition, the monk Ambrosio is renowned for his faith and his strength of will, a saint in the eyes of the populace. But when he discovers the beautiful Matilda hidden in his own monastery, all his repressed passions begin to show themselves, and he is soon using the girl, and her powers, in his lust for more innocent prey.

The charming Lulu, a cabaret singer and dancer, has no shortage of admirers. When she decides to get married, she sets her heart on Robert, a young industrialist, but he is already married. Disappointed, she sets out in search of the ideal man.

A young nurse meets a tourist from Hong Kong at Angkor Wat, and they fall in love. Later, they encounter each other again, with the nurse in the Cambodian Army and the tourist as a war reporter.

Marcel Spadice is a famous writer with a criminal background and a penchant for handsome men. From time to time, he induces an attractive female admirer to arrange for him to be introduced to nice, talented young men who happen to be sufficiently handsome to interest him. At other times, the endless effort to woo these men (who are most often heterosexual) grows wearying, and he goes to the train station to pick up soldiers looking for some easy money and a night's lodging. In this film, the writer has grown enamored with a young circus laborer who wants to move up in the world, literally, by becoming a tightrope walker. Marcel cadges an introduction, and for a time sponsors the young man's training. However, when the boy suffers an accident which renders him unfit for his chosen vocation, Marcel loses interest in him and takes up with another young man.

Still grieving his young wife's death in a hit-and-run accident, Manhattan cab-driver David Marks accepts a regular evening assignment to drive a beautiful but enigmatic woman to a mansion outside New York. One night he tries to discover the truth behind his mystery fare; but in doing so finds himself wanted for a murder he didn't commit. There follows his frantic hunt to uncover the truth behind the murder: the action moves to the streets of New York as the police scour the city in pursuit. But the cab drivers of Manhattan join forces to aid the desperate fugitive, until the solution is finally revealed in a sudden and bizarre end to the mystery.

The mysterious "K" takes a humble job and falls in love with his landlady's daughter, Sidney Page. Sidney discourages her boyish admirer, Joe Drummond, and seeks training as a nurse. Infatuated with the head surgeon, Dr. Max Wilson, she accepts his proposal, which infuriates nurse Carlotta, who also loves Max. Carlotta lures Max to a roadhouse, where Joe, mistaking her for Sidney, shoots Max. K appears and, assuming his true identity as the famous Dr. Edwards, saves Max's life by performing his "Edwards operation."

General Mchulpich plots a coup with the CIA and South Vietnam to secede two provinces from Cambodia.

Going beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, the acclaimed filmmaker, Anders Østergaard, brings us close to the video journalists who deliver the footage. Though risking torture and life in jail, courageous young citizens of Burma live the essence of journalism as they insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country.