Best movies like Call for Dreams

Five broken cameras – and each one has a powerful tale to tell. Embedded in the bullet-ridden remains of digital technology is the story of Emad Burnat, a farmer from the Palestinian village of Bil’in, which famously chose nonviolent resistance when the Israeli army encroached upon its land to make room for Jewish colonists. Emad buys his first camera in 2005 to document the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. Over the course of the film, he becomes the peaceful archivist of an escalating struggle as olive trees are bulldozed, lives are lost, and a wall is built to segregate burgeoning Israeli settlements.

Three parallel stories of immigrants in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War and about coming together while sealed in a room during the Scud attacks.

Brothers Yaki and Shaul live with their parents in Petah Tikva, a satellite town of Tel Aviv. Yaki is doing military service. As for all other 18-year-old Israelis, this means he is allowed to carry a gun. This weapon gives the brothers the power to change their lives and that of their family – or so they believe.

Three people in Tokyo take a surreal voyage of self-discovery through memory and nightmares. "O" intends suicide while talking on a cell-phone with a stranger he meets on line who plans a simultaneous suicide. Events take a horrifying turn. Keiko Kirishima is a cool, seemingly emotionless police detective, brilliant but off-putting. She's faced with two mutilated corpses who appear to have killed themselves, but she's not sure. A cell-phone number links the deaths. She calls on Akumu Tantei, a poor and suicidal young man who has the ability to enter people's dreams. He's reluctant to help. His past haunts him. A subconscious duel of terror and blood awaits the three.

Or shoulders a lot: she's 17 or 18, a student, works evenings at a restaurant, recycles cans and bottles for cash, and tries to keep her mother Ruthie from returning to streetwalking in Tel Aviv. Ruthie calls Or "my treasure," but Ruthie is a burden. She's just out of hospital, weak, and Or has found her a job as a house cleaner. The call of the quick money on the street is tough for Ruthie to ignore. Or's emotions roil further when the mother of the youth she's in love with comes to the flat to warn her off. With love fading and Ruthie perhaps beyond help, Or's choices narrow.

Meduzot (the Hebrew word for Jellyfish) tells the story of three very different Israeli women living in Tel Aviv whose intersecting stories weave an unlikely portrait of modern Israeli life. Batya, a catering waitress, takes in a young child apparently abandoned at a local beach. Batya is one of the servers at the wedding reception of Keren, a young bride who breaks her leg in trying to escape from a locked toilet stall, which ruins her chance at a romantic honeymoon in the Caribbean. One of the guests is Joy, a Philippine chore woman attending the event with her employer, and who doesn't speak any Hebrew (she communicates mainly in English), and who is guilt-ridden after having left her young son behind in the Philippines.

Life in a Tel Aviv apartment complex, an urban mosaic whose seedy characters, try as they might, can't get out of one another's faces. Gabi, a bobbed haired sexpot, and her lover Hezi—who's older, balding and married—rent a room to have an affair, while Ezra, a pot bellied divorcee, supervises an illegal construction site next door. All this racket drives Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor, to a mental breakdown. Other characters include illegal Chinese immigrants, a teenage boy who's afraid to serve in the army, and a corrupt police detective.

Tel Aviv, Israel. The twisted paths of three very different men brutally collide due to a chain of unspeakable murders: a grieving father who has been doomed to seek vengeance and a police detective who boldly crosses the narrow boundary between law and crime meet a religion teacher suspected of being the murderer.

A delicate, poetic cinematic work, consisting of two parallel axes. Lenny Sadeh is a Tel Aviv based scholar who passes through the last day of her life. Yasmin Nasser, an Arab nurse who lives in Jaffa, is interrogated by the police. The worlds of these two women meet for a critical moment and bound together inseparably.

Charles Hodgson is a British aristocrat who decides to become a thief as a way of getting at his twin brother, Earl, a security expert who has built a supposedly impregnable vault in Tel Aviv, which holds a cache of diamonds. For the caper, Charles enlists Archie, a heist expert, and Sally. He also becomes acquainted with an American woman, Zelda Shapiro, who is in Israel looking for a new husband.

The flat on the third floor of a Bauhaus building in Tel Aviv was where my grandparents lived since they immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s. Were it not for the view from the windows, one might have thought that the flat was in Berlin. When my grandmother passed away at the age of 98 we were called to the flat to clear out what was left. Objects, pictures, letters and documents awaited us, revealing traces of a troubled and unknown past. The film begins with the emptying out of a flat and develops into a riveting adventure, involving unexpected national interests, a friendship that crosses enemy lines, and deeply repressed family emotions. And even reveals some secrets that should have probably remained untold...

A group of friends in a Tel Aviv suburb get together to watch Universong, a Eurovision-like television song contest. They gather to watch and are depressed by the lifelessness of the Israeli entry, a parody of many recent offerings, a flashy, grating song about "amour." Realizing that Anat is distraught over the crisis in her marriage, they decide to compose a song to cheer her up. As a lark, they enters their cellphone video of it in next year's contest, and it becomes Israel's entry.

A gay New York Times travel writer comes to Tel Aviv after suffering a tragedy. The energy of the city and his relationship with a younger man brings him back to life.

The police are tracking a man who shoots at people. But the young sister of a detective finds that he's not the mad vigilante portrayed in newspapers.

It articulates the essence of one's internal exile through the portrait of a Jewish-German refugee who arrived in Israel on the eve of World War II, started a family – but has nevertheless, yet to feel at home in his new country. He remains connected to Berlin with every fiber of his being; the city’s culture, its essence, and as far as he’s concerned, Israel is no more than a pit stop. He gradually pulls away from his wife, his son who does not get him, his sisters who are haunted by the past, and the rental flat where he’s lived all these years. He sets up shop in a budget hotel by the Tel Aviv seaside, hangs out with a group of fringe misfits, and dreams of moving back to Berlin.

Meow is a young woman roaming the streets and nightclubs of Tel Aviv. She lives in empty apartments and surfs the internet chat rooms. She decides to meet Alex, her chat buddy. They plan to meet in a nightclub but a suicide bombing prevents their meeting. She survives the attack and after she finds Alex in the hospital, in a coma, she moves into his empty apartment. Gradually, the tenants start referring to her as Alex, and as she assumes his identity, she finds herself sinking into a dangerous and deluded reality.

Tel Aviv, Summer 1989. Boaz, a beautiful and alluring linguistics student, receives anonymous, male written love letters, that undermine his sexual identity and interfere on his peaceful life with his beloved girlfriend.

Ajami is an area of Tel Aviv in Israel where Arabs, Palestinians, Jews and Christians live together in a tense atmosphere. Omar, an Israeli Arab, struggles to save his family from a gang of extortionists. He also courts a beautiful Christian girl: Hadir. Malek, an illegal Palestinian worker, tries to collect enough money to pay for his mother's operation. Dando, an Israeli cop, does his utmost to find his missing brother who may have been killed by Palestinians.

The unbelievable story of 22 year old Or, who secretly finances his sex change operation in Thailand by lying to his conservative parents and then returns home as a woman to face her new life, her family and the cost of living her dream

A troubled young man mysteriously appears in a rural Minnesota town from which he claims he was abducted 16 years ago.

A man who is still mourning the death of the woman he loves, meets a man who says he created a machine that can bring anyone to a parallel world. He goes and sees the woman he loves is still alive in that world and wants to stay. But when he discovers that this world has rules that differ from his world, he wants to leave but when he goes back to where the machine is, there's a fire and the machine is destroyed and the man who built it is killed. He later meets a woman from his world who also built a machine of her own but the officials there upon seeing her thinks she's crazy because her counterpart is alive and says she doesn't know her. So he tries to help her so that they can return home.

Yoav's demons start haunting him after his best friend becomes pregnant, without telling him, and after his boyfriend of 15 years starts talking about children, too. His life unravels, and self-destruction seems inevitable.

A Tel Aviv taxi breaks down, and while the driver attempts to repair it, the passengers take shelter and relate tales to each other. One man relates how he became a hero, in a comic fashion, while on Army maneuvers; an elderly woman tells of her first visit to the big city; another woman tells how she and her husband invited his boss and his wife to their home for dinner, with the intent of getting the husband a raise, and they wound up in a hospital thinking they had food poisoning. Another story concerns how the police caught a demented-thief who stole from a bank to give money to the poor.

At thirty-seven, Miri is a twice-widowed, El Al flight attendant. Her well-regulated existence is suddenly turned upside down by an abandoned Chinese boy whose migrant-worker mother has been summarily deported from Israel. The film is a touching comic-drama in which two human beings -- as different from each other as Tel Aviv is from Beijing -- accompany each other on a remarkable journey, one that takes them both back to a meaningful life.

Three stories about three women: one is trying to find the right guy; one is trying to get a divorce from her runaway husband so she takes hostages; one turns Tel Aviv upside down in order to save a kitten trapped in a storm drain.

The story of Salomonico who works in the Tel Aviv Port and tries to defend his house and his life.

Joy can't let go of her ex, but doesn't seem to be able to fall for the new guy. In the meantime she keeps having casual sex with strangers.

Set in Tel Aviv, focuses on an interconnected group of friends and their various relationships. At the center is the adorably bookish Omer, about to turn 30, who still hasn't found himself, and his free-spirited best friend Miki, who both end up inadvertently dating the same handsome journalist, Ronen.

The film takes place in Tel Aviv, much of it in a fictitious local pub called Barbie, a satirical nickname for a famous Israeli mental health institution. The pub's name hints at the characters and the events which occur in the pub and which befall its owner (Daliah), the employees and customers. The plot unfolds with a streak of violence which takes a surprising turn.

Aviva, a hard-working hotel cook in the small northern Israeli town of Tiberias, is on the brink of finally fulfilling her lifelong dream. For years she kept her remarkable writing abilities under wraps, until her sister, Anita, introduces her to Oded, an accomplished novelist. Immediately recognizing Aviva's talent, Oded takes her under his wing, promising to help her achieve greatness. But the journey to greatness effects her life and the lives of her family - her unemployed husband, her trouble children, her unstable mother, and primarily her sister, a funny and sensitive woman who have her own dreams. When Aviva discovered that Oded has other plans for her work, her world collapses.

Michale is a thirty year old woman. She works with her father in a Tel Aviv accounting office providing services to important religious institutions. She divides her time between her child, her husband, her work and the man with whom she is having an affair. When Michale learns of the tragic death of her lover, her life is shattered.

Goldberg is short and thin. He wears glasses. He's lonely. He's a mediocre computer programmer that lives in Tel Aviv and spends most of his energy searching online for a girlfriend. His only friend is Audrey, his beloved female dog. Eisenberg is a thug. Tall, fat, approaching middle age and not completely sane. He spends his days slouching around Meir Park, harassing innocent bystanders and doing business with petty thieves and small-time criminals. Unfortunately the two cross paths, and Eisenberg decides that they should start hanging out. But something in his demeanor says that he wants to be much more than just friends...This is a story about random meetings with strangers that lead to anxiety and paranoia. About lonely people in the big city. About losing control.

As in previous editions, lesbian filmmakers were asked to visualize their conceptions and observations of gay eroticism and sexuality, just as, conversely, gay filmmakers were asked to explore lesbian love in the Israeli capital.

Vicky (Angelica Vale) travels to Israel dressed as a nun to find her estranged husband, who is an illegal salsa dancing teacher in Tel Aviv. On her way there she meets Yoni (Angel Bonanni), a shy University professor who helps her go through Israeli customs.

In a bustling Tel Aviv, a man suffering from insomnia tries to remember if someone actually shot him in one the city's underground parking garages. He no longer knows what is real or a dream while the city increasingly reflects the human condition. A young woman wakes up in a hotel room in Shanghai from that dream by a mysterious phone call. A fragmented conversation with a stranger who seems to also be a lover, rolls into a dazed odyssey in what seems like another dream amidst nocturnal Shanghai.