Best movies like Defiant Souls

In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery. Facing cruelty as well as unexpected kindnesses Solomon struggles not only to stay alive, but to retain his dignity. In the twelfth year of his unforgettable odyssey, Solomon’s chance meeting with a Canadian abolitionist will forever alter his life.

In 1850 Oregon, when a backwoodsman brings a wife home to his farm, his six brothers decide that they want to get married too.

On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With the help of the attending hands, the mother expels the placenta. The infant, a baby girl, nurses. We return from time to time to the bath scene. By the end, dad's excited; mother and daughter rest.

Adam, an awkward teen, spends a summer with his older sister, who is part of New York City's lesbian and trans activist scene. He meets the girl of his dreams but can't figure out how to tell her he's not the trans man she thinks he is.

The true story of William Wilberforce and his courageous quest to end the British slave trade. Along the way, Wilberforce meets intense opposition, but his minister urges him to see the cause through.

In 1840s England, palaeontologist Mary Anning and a young woman sent by her husband to convalesce by the sea develop an intense relationship. Despite the chasm between their social spheres and personalities, Mary and Charlotte discover they can each offer what the other has been searching for: the realisation that they are not alone. It is the beginning of a passionate and all-consuming love affair that will defy all social bounds and alter the course of both lives irrevocably.

After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved". Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things start to happen...

In the 1940s in the small town of Jupiter Hollow, two sets of identical twins are born in the same hospital on the same night. One set to a poor local family and the other to a rich family just passing through. The dizzy nurse on duty accidentally mixes the twins unbeknown to the parents. Our story flashes forward to the 1980s where the mismatched sets of twins are about to cross paths.

A man searches for his brother on an island where a vicious woman keeps slaves on a plantation.

A nurse in the Caribbean turns to voodoo in hopes of curing her patient, a mindless woman whose husband she's fallen in love with.

Warren Maxwell, the owner of a run-down plantation, pressures his son, Hammond, to marry and produce an heir to inherit the plantation. Hammond settles on his own cousin, Blanche, but purchases a sex slave when he returns from the honeymoon. Meanwhile, Warren buys a new Mandingo slave named Mede to breed and to earn money as a prize-fighter.

Naive, but brash and sultry teenage runaway Bonnie finds herself lost and adrift in America. The lovely young lass runs afoul of a colorful array of evil oddballs who all treat her like an object.

The story of the Agojie, the all-female unit of warriors who protected the African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 1800s with skills and a fierceness unlike anything the world has ever seen, and General Nanisca as she trains the next generation of recruits and readies them for battle against an enemy determined to destroy their way of life.

Traces over three generations an immigrant family's trials, tribulations, tragedies, and triumphs. Maria and Jose, the first generation, come to Los Angeles, meet, marry, face deportation all in the 1930s. They establish their family in East L.A., and their children Chucho, Paco, Memo, Irene, Toni, and Jimmy deal with youth culture and the L.A. police in the '50s. As the second generation become adults in the '60s, the focus shifts to Jimmy, his marriage to Isabel (a Salvadorian refugee), their son, and Jimmy's journey to becoming a responsible parent.

An artist falls for a married young woman while he's commissioned to paint her portrait. The two invest in the risky tulip market in hopes to build a future together.

Two men separated by 100 years are united in their search for freedom. In 1856 a slave, Samuel Woodward and his family, escape from the Monroe Plantation near Richmond, Virginia. A secret network of ordinary people known as the Underground Railroad guide the family on their journey north to Canada. They are relentlessly pursued by the notorious slave hunter Plimpton. Hunted like a dog and haunted by the unthinkable suffering he and his forbears have endured, Samuel is forced to decide between revenge or freedom. 100 years earlier in 1748, John Newton the Captain of a slave trader sails from Africa with a cargo of slaves, bound for America. On board is Samuel's great grandfather whose survival is tied to the fate of Captain Newton. The voyage changes Newton's life forever and he creates a legacy that will inspire Samuel and the lives of millions for generations to come.

Living in Kentucky prior to the Civil War, Amantha Starr is a privileged young woman. Her widowed father, a wealthy plantation owner, dotes on her and sends her to the best schools. When he dies suddenly Amantha's world is turned upside down. She learns that her father had been living on borrowed money and that her mother was actually a slave and her father's mistress.

John Zinga, a descendent of slaves, has an ancient medallion around his neck and a fragment of song passed down generations. He is an English dockworker with a magnificent voice and a yearning to learn his roots.

On a photo shoot in Ghana, an American model slips back in time, becomes enslaved on a plantation and bears witness to the agony of her ancestral past.

Savannah is the true story of Ward Allen, a romantic and bombastic character who rejects his plantation heritage for the freedom of life on a river. Ward navigates the change of early 20th century America on the wrong side of the law and society, his long-time friend, a freed slave named Christmas Moultrie, at his side. Master of Shakespeare, and the shotgun that provides Savannah's markets with fowl, Ward fights for his rights as a hunter. His charisma and eloquent rhetoric win the heart of a society woman who defies her father to marry him. An elderly Moultrie tells the story of life on the river with his friend to a little boy, who passes the legendary Ward Allen down to the next generation.

Yuli is the nickname given to Carlos Acosta by his father, Pedro, who considers him the son of Ogun, an African god and a fighter. As a child Yuli avoids discipline and education, learning from the streets of an impoverished and abandoned Havana. His father, however, has other ideas, and knowing that his son has a natural talent for dance, sends him to the National Ballet School of Cuba. Despite his repeated escapes and initial poor behaviour, the boy is inevitably drawn to the world of dance, and begins to shape his legendary career from a young age, becoming the first black dancer to be cast in some of the most prestigious ballet roles, originally written for white dancers, in companies such as the Houston Ballet or the Royal Ballet in London.

Paul Freeman (of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK fame) and Kate O'Mara plays a couple who can't have a baby, so they go to the doctor to have an artificial insemination...blackmail, dark secrets and drama ensue.

The beautiful, brutal Olga procures prostitutes and pushes heroin for the syndicate, confining and torturing her pretty victims in a private dungeon located in New York City's sinister Chinatown.

Vincent Price stars in this early '60s adaptation of Thomas De Quincey's thriller about an opium addict trying to solve a mystery in San Francisco's Chinatown.

A Kentucky slave fights for his freedom from cruel overseer whose mistress eventually joins Davis and the other slaves in their revolt.

A mother of three daughters (one died at the age of three) commits a crime of conscience and becomes radicalized in prison; she turns into an idealist run amok, determined to change her little corner of the world for the better. Her middle daughter, with a physician for a father, an older sister who joins Doctors Without Borders, and a baby sister who dies, is fanatically trying to find a place for herself in this family of overachievers.

Based in Quebec, this film is a portrait of lesbian and gay families as well as the story of how they organized out of conditions of violence and discrimination to win recognition of their relationships, families and parenting rights. Also tells the story of the landmark case in Quebec that broke the ban against same-sex marriage, making Quebec the third province in Canada to recognize equal marriage.

The relationship between Eric and Stephanie is floundering. They decide to leave for the Republic of Santiago to visit the famous ruins. Once there, they learn that a serial killer rages on steep roads of the region, eliminating drunk drivers.

Fanny Kemble is a famous star of the English stage, but while touring the United States, she gives up her career to marry wealthy American Pierce Butler. Moving with him from Philadelphia to his Georgia plantation, Fanny sees slavery firsthand, and her outrage leads her to help the family's slaves in open defiance of her spouse. Undaunted by the consequences, Fanny eventually writes a book that strengthens the anti-slavery movement.

A woman is abandoned by her lover and prostitution is the only way she has to survive.

A woman discovers the truth about her former lover from the diary that his first wife wrote to their son, Nicholas.

The story of Cecilia is a story of the society that dominated 19th-century Cuba, a society divided between whites, blacks, and those who were mixed, the mulattos. (Since the Spanish conquistadors killed off the Indian population in Cuba not long after they took over the island, there are no mestizos, or those of mixed-Indian blood in Cuba as in other Caribbean nations.) At any rate, the drama about the life and loves of Cecilia (Daisy Granados) takes place against the backdrop of graphically violent mistreatment of slaves and the rumors of a slave rebellion after the Cubans hear of slaves turning against their captors in Haiti.

A thirty year old man returns from South America to his native village, in the mountains of Yugoslavia, to find his spouse and take her along. He chooses the youngest daughter of self-supporting Jewish woman. The deceit gets discovered on the way to South America. Seven poor girls, among whom is his future wife, are imprisoned in ship's deck. He took them, promising rich marriage, and his real intention is to employ them in bordello houses of Buenos Aires, where the girls, not knowing the language, would be left to his mercy.

Narrates the story of Cuban revolutionary Ignacio Agramonte

Kate Tarleton grows up on a Southern plantation and becomes engaged to her guardian, Dr. Robert Manning, a famous surgeon. When Robert, Kate, and her younger sister Mary Lou visit New York, where the doctor wishes to conduct medical experiments, the superstitious Kate goes to the home of a fortune-teller named Stella Hill. Stella, whose principal business is white slave trafficking, drugs Kate and forces her to work in a "den of vice," run by Stella and her accomplice Jimmy Bristol, where she contracts syphilis and goes insane. Robert, Detective Ellis, and a lawyer named Billy Meredith rescue Kate, who recovers her sanity but remembers nothing of her bondage.