Best movies like Earth and Ashes

After a string of abusive relationships, Wanda abandons her family and seeks solace in the company of a petty criminal.

After an Afghanistan-born woman who lives in Canada receives a letter from her suicidal sister, she takes a perilous journey through Afghanistan to try to find her.

After her husband dies, Alice and her son, Tommy, leave their small New Mexico town for California, where Alice hopes to make a new life for herself as a singer. Money problems force them to settle in Arizona instead, where Alice takes a job as waitress in a small diner.

Eager to provide a better future for her son, Fadi, divorcée Muna Farah leaves her Palestinian homeland and takes up residence in rural Illinois -- just in time to encounter the domestic repercussions of America's disastrous war in Iraq. Now, the duo must reinvent their lives with some help from Muna's sister, Raghda, and brother-in-law, Nabeel.

During the war in Afghanistan a Soviet tank crew commanded by a tyrannical officer find themselves lost and in a struggle against a band of Mujahadeen guerrillas in the mountains.

A family is torn apart during the American Civil War. Abner Beech (Billy Campbell), a righteous farmer from upstate New York, exercises his right to free speech in a time when families are divided by the Civil War.

Sumru, a young ethnomusicologist in search of her lost lover, leaves Istanbul for a three-month research project in Diyarbakır. While crossing paths with locals and tracing the pains of others through a music project based on Anatolian mournings, she comes to confront the remnants of her own agony.

Eliane Devries is the seemingly repressed owner of a prosperous rubber plantation in French Indochina, circa 1930. Her steely exterior, however, is only a mask intended to hide her torrid love affairs from upper class society

A middle-aged man recalls his childhood growing up in and around London during World War II.

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 widowed child psychologist lives in an isolated existence in rural New England. When caught in a deadly winter storm, she must find a way to rescue a young boy before he disappears forever.

After returning home from an extended tour in Afghanistan, a decorated U.S. Army medic and single mother struggles to rebuild her relationship with her young son.

An elderly, yet young-at-heart man, moves in with his grandson, and both their lives turn upside-down.

A busy executive learns during a meeting that his mother may be dying and rushes home to her side. He ends up being his father's caretaker and becomes closer to him than ever before. Estranged from his own son, the executive comes to realize what has been missing in his own life.

The chance to shine in a singing competition offers much-needed hope for a Southern middle-schooler who's drowning in worries, from bullies in the halls to turmoil at home -- and the news that his reservist father has been called back to Afghanistan.

Adam Ousmane is a pool attendant at a local resort. When the new managers decide to downsize, Adam loses his job to his own son, Abdel. Shattered by the turn of events, Adam is pressured into contributing to the Chadian war effort. With no money to speak of, the only asset he can donate is his son.

An emotionally constrained view of the displacement of human feelings in our video saturated society. Van regularly visits his grandmother in a run-down nursing home. His father depends on phone sex for guidance meanwhile erasing family homevideos of happier times with homemade pornography. Will Van rescue his grandmother and memories of his mother in time?

Mathieu Roy's L’Autre maison is an intimate and powerful family drama featuring three generations of great Quebec Actors. Marcel Sabourin plays Henri Bernard, an 86 year-old man with a failing grip on reality. His sons, a jet setting middle aged photo-journalist (Roy Dupuis) and a younger pilot-in-training (Emile Proulx-Cloutier) disagree on a course of action, leaving the father and the younger son inhabiting a rustic cottage in the woods. As the older man's health deteriorates, options become more limited; when an IED accident in Afghanistan kills the photo-journalist's translator, the family must come together like never before. Shot in Quebec, Iceland, Africa and Asia, Another House blends elements of memory, perception and lyricism into a remarkable cinematic mix that moves the story well beyond direct domestic issues into a visual realm that balances nature and humanity.

Monique is dying of cancer, lying in bed in the apartment above the store her family owns. Her philandering husband carries on with life, her son remains aloof, and her daughter-in-law wonders if she is witnessing her own decline. They all struggle to express, or feel, their love for one another.

Successful lawyer Michael Pierson is gay, but he has always hidden this part of his life from his mother, Katherine, father, Nick, and grandmother Beatrice. But when Michael discovers he has AIDS and is dying of complications from the disease, he must open up to his parents and the rest of his family. Though fearful of their reactions, he introduces them to his longtime lover, Peter, and looks to them for support.

New York attorney Libby (Juliette Lewis) is a go-getter who won't let anyone stand in the way of her success. But when she accepts a pro bono case involving young Afghan dissident Meena (Layla Alizada), Libby finds her corporate dreams replaced by a growing sense of idealism. Seeking asylum in the United States after years of oppression under the Taliban, Meena desperately wants freedom, and Libby is her only hope. But can Libby deliver?

When Jamie's maternal grandmother dies, he and his brother Tommy are separated - Tommy is taken off to a welfare home and Jamie goes to live with his other grandmother and uncle. His life is far from happy, filled with silence, rejection and bouts of violence.

Jerry (Jamie Draven) was an idealist when he served in the first Gulf War. But when he was later deployed to Iraq, Jerry was an older man, a father of three and embittered by broken promises and unfulfilled desires. When Jerry returns from Iraq he has been transformed by horrors that cannot be forgiven. He lives a life of poverty, his children afraid of him and his wife, Nora (Vinessa Shaw), unsympathetic and unhappy. When Jerry discovers that Nora has betrayed him, his anger and despair drive him to commit an act so heinous and irreversible that nothing he had experienced in combat could have prepared him for.

A semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in the Cotswolds during and immediately after the First World War.

As we follow a mother and her son, we delve into a past marred by an accident that tears them apart. She will become a renowned artist and healer, and he will grow into his own and a peculiar falconer who bears the marks of a double absence. In the present, a young journalist will bring about an encounter between the two that puts the very meaning of life and art into question, so that we may contemplate the possibility of living life to its fullest, despite the uncertainties littering our paths.

In a rural school in the middle of the mountains, a girl who is starting to become a woman feels the profound need to discover her true identity. She does not know who her father is and she is determined to find him, but her mother does not approve it. The hostility of winter in such a harsh place turns this desire into a real threat: freezing in the middle of nowhere. Going behind the backs of the school authorities and the girl's mother, her teacher decides to help her. They set off on this quest for truth, but it is not going to be an easy journey... Their only clue is a small, rusty plate.

A couple whose son had been institutionalized for three years are shocked to discover that the diagnosis was wrong, and that their son is, in fact, deaf.

The story begins on a fine summers morning, when San-woo and his mother board a bus to the country. It is soon clear that the unsophisticated rural passengers annoy the seven-year-old urban boy. His mother is taking him to live with his 78-year-old mute, but not deaf, grandmother while she looks for a new job after a business venture failed in Seoul.

Nogreh is a young Afghani woman living with her father and her sister-in-law, Leylomah, whose husband, Akhtar, is missing. Beyond the issue of Akhtar, Leylomah is most concerned with how to feed her baby. She cannot provide milk for her baby as her own hunger is preventing her from lactating. Nogreh, however, aspires toward a life in a western styled democracy. Although the Taliban are no longer in power in Afghanistan, traditional forces are still active in the country. Nogreh often displays signs of rebellion, such as wearing a pair of white pumps instead of the traditional slipper beneath her burqa. But mostly, Nogreh wants to be educated. Without her father's knowledge, Nogreh is attending a secular girls school. Ultimately, she wants to become President of Afghanistan. With the help of a Pakistani refugee who likes her as a woman, Nogreh tries to understand exactly what forces led to current world leaders being elected, those forces which she wants to emulate.

Chad, 2006. After a forty-year civil war, the radio announces the government has just amnestied the war criminals. Outraged by the news, Gumar Abatcha orders his grandson Atim, a sixteen-year-old youth, to trace the man who killed his father and to execute him. Atim obeys him and, armed with his father's own gun, he goes in search of Nassara, the man who made him an orphan. It does not take long before he finds him. Nassara, who now goes straight, is married, goes to the mosque and owns a small bakery. After some hesitation Atim offers him his services as an apprentice. He is hired then it will be easy for him to gun down the murderer of his father. At least, that is what he thinks...

A willful young boy follows his just as obstinate grandmother in a journey across Iraq, determined to discover the fate of her missing son, Ahmed's father, who never returned from war.

Elderly Aleksandra visits her Russian soldier grandson, Denis, at the Chechen war front, providing comfort as she tours his army. All the while, Denis ponders the reason for her unexpected appearance.

Agustín forgets things; he is aging and he knows it. María is never alone: she watches over everyone, sleeps very little, and works too much. She’s increasingly overwhelmed. One day, on impulse, María decides to abandon Agustín.

This is the story of two women on opposite ends of a lifetime, a very young, curious Jiyan and her life-weary but resistant grandmother Berfe, in order to save the person who links them to each other.

Burdened by memories of their late father, three sisters struggle to escape the suffocating environment of the dying town of Veles. A contemporary story of urban decay, „Jas sum od Titov Veles“ employs a stark realism to depict the vivid landscape of post-Communist Macedonia.