Best movies like Dear Mr. Waldman

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.

Eli is a teenager struggling with an eating disorder, and every aspect of his life is on the brink of disaster. He lives in a seedy neighborhood in Southern Tel Aviv with his mother and her new husband, two ex-junkies, while his alcoholic father is an unemployed artist and street philosopher. Eli's desperate efforts to unite his family spin out of control, when a minor family dispute erupts into a cataclysmic tragedy.

In the city of Jaffa; a young girl plans to run away with her secret lover, when a tragedy forever changes the course of their lives. Jaffa is a mixed Arabic - Jewish seaside city near Tel Aviv, where Reuven Wolf (Moni Moshonov) has a garage for repairing cars. His wife Ossi (Ronit Elkabetz), a vain, self-centered woman, just makes everybody's life difficult. The couple's daughter, Mali Wolf (Dana Ivgy), has secretly fallen in love with her childhood friend, the young Toufik (newcomer Mahmud Shalaby), a hard-working youth who has come as a helping hand to his Israeli-Arab father Hassan, a long-time mechanic working for Reuven.

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.

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.

The movie follows a group of young friends in the city of Tel Aviv and is as much a love song to the city as it is an exploration of the claim that people in Tel Aviv are isolated from the rest of the country and the turmoil it's going through. The movie looks at young people's lives in Tel Aviv through the POVs of gays and straights, Jews and Arabs, men and women.

A look at the life of Cecil Gaines who served eight presidents as the White House's head butler from 1952 to 1986, and had a unique front-row seat as political and racial history was made.

Stingo, a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie and her lover Nathan, he learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan's relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan's fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.

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...

Menahem Lang, an actor with an extraordinary singing voice, returns to Bnei Brak, the city in Israel where he grew up and a center of ultra-orthodox Judaism. Now in his 30s, Lang left the city at 20, following years of rape and sexual abuse by elder, devout family men in the community. Yet, Lang was far from being an isolated case: his conversations with other abused young men document a cycle of sexual predators and tormented lives.

After being found wandering the streets of Los Angeles, a severely catatonic woman tells a doctor the complex story of how she wound up there.

Shahar Rozen presents a moving portrait of two women who forsake convention and acceptance to share a deep love and friendship. Round Trip is a story from Israel that depicts a blossoming relationship amidst the stark outskirts of Tel Aviv, between Nurit a mother of two separated from her husband who drives a bus for a living, and Mushedi, her live-in nanny from Ghana . Soon, Nurit’s husband infers that the two women are engaged in an un-orthodox relationship, and challenges their committed and abiding love. This thoughtfully created narrative serves as a gentle reminder that throughout the world, people continue to struggle for love, but that the journey of self-discovery makes the trip worthwhile.

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.

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

Movie follows two young gay hustlers through interwoven stories during a night in Tel Aviv.

Yoram, a 50-year-old veterinarian living in Tel-Aviv, is forced to re-examine his relationship with his adolescent daughter Roni, after she wishes to end her life. He decides to take her on a journey to visit her mother’s family, a process of self and mutual discovery in a primordial desert land enveloping the Dead Sea.

Shlomo who discovers in his son's Assaf room, women's clothing and accessories, decides to 'teach the boy a lesson'. When Assaf returns to his parents' home on a rainy night from a party, his attempts to enter home fail. His father, with the silent consent of his mother, locked the door. At present, 4 years later, Gallia turns to an investigation agency to help her find her son Assaf and bring him to Shlomo, his father who is dying of cancer. One night, at a night club in Tel Aviv, Assaf is seen performing as a beautiful transgender lady singer who goes by the name of Anna. After a few days a private nurse turns up at Shlomo's room at the hospital, sent as she claims by the insurance agency to assist Shlomo. The nurse is Anna (his son Assaf) and she manages to conquer Shlomo's heart by her charming personality and her special attitude toward life.

With her husband jailed for Wall Street-based fraud, Faith has to leave behind her luxury life in New York to return home to North Carolina and the widower father and dutiful older sister she left behind. Together, they have to deal with the buried emotions of sudden death of Faith’s mother years ago, and learn to be a family again. Like the Prodigal story, Heart of the Country is a tale of a father’s unconditional love. He simply wants a relationship with his children, and once that relationship is restored, he begins to create healing for his broken daughter. Her marriage has to be rebuilt, her belief in herself, and her peace with her mother’s death all come together through the quiet, selfless guidance of her loving father. The novel, written by Rene Gutteridge from the original screenplay by filmmaker John Ward, takes us from the glamour of Manhattan to the open beauty of the fields of rural Columbus County, North Carolina as the timeless tale of the Prodigal Son is reborn!

Seventy years after his grandfather escapes from Nazi Germany to Palestine, Israeli documentary director Tomer Heymann returns to the country of his ancestors to present his film "Paper Dolls" at the Berlin International Film Festival, and there meets a man who will change his life. This 48-hour love affair, originating in Berghain Panorama Bar, develops into a significant relationship between Tomer and Andreas Merk, a German dancer.

In 1985, there were three gays who were out of the closet in Israel. By 1998, there were 3,000. In this short, intensive and dramatic period, Israel came out of the closet in one of the quickest and most colourful revolutions of the end of the 20th century.

Dad's in Heaven with Nixon is a 2010 documentary film produced, directed and written by Tom Murray. It concerns the history of the Murray family and especially of Tom's brother Chris Murray, a man with autism whose paintings of cityscapes, first promoted by family friend Gloria Vanderbilt, have garnered widespread praise. The title refers to Chris' belief that his late father, who loathed Richard Nixon, is now friends in heaven with the former president. Ranging over three generations of Murrays, whose patriarchs struggled with alcoholism and bipolar disorder, the film treats of subjects ranging from father-son relationships to the Great Depression, from the effects of divorce on families to the cushy lifestyle of the residents of Southhampton, New York.

Family members struggle to heal their emotional wounds after an incident of sexual abuse.

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.

Set against a backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestinian rapper Kareem and his singer girlfriend Manar struggle, love and make music in their crime-ridden ghetto and Tel Aviv's hip-hop club scene.

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.

When Yoel hears about an imminent Iranian military attack on Tel Aviv, he knows what to do - escape with his family to a safe haven in Jerusalem. His son Assaf, who is a filmmaker and about to become a father himself, wants to give Yoel one last lead role in his movie by melting the fictional world into bittersweet reality.

In the easy-going, sexually-liberated 1970's Tel Aviv, three young friends, struggling filmmaker Nati, his impressionable girlfriend Ossi and his geeky friend Mushon, move in together in a small apartment in Dizengoff Street number 99. By day, they work a boring desk office job but by night the city is their playground. Their overall goal is to make their way into the commercial movie making business, but harsh realities and romances often sidetrack them. Their fourth friend and Nati's older other girlfriend is aspiring musician, Miri.

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

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.

At first, they make love even if they are not in the same country. She's in Paris, he's in Tel Aviv. Time passes and over-communication kills their privacy. In the end, they fall in love for the first time.

Two outcasts, a suicide bomber and an Israeli girl, fall in love during a desperate weekend in Tel Aviv.

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.