Best movies like Endless Borders

Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.

During the 2006 World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain, numerous young women are caught and rounded up for dressing as men so they could gain access to the game. Guarded by several soldiers in a holding pen, the women attempt to keep updated on the score.

After the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the restriction of women in public life, a pre-teen girl is forced to masquerade as a boy in order to find work to support her mother and grandmother.

A tax collector is accused of taking bribes, and also has to deal with problems at home, including a suicide attempt by his wife.

In 2009, Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was covering Iran's volatile elections for Newsweek. One of the few reporters living in the country with access to US media, he made an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a taped interview with comedian Jason Jones. The interview was intended as satire, but if the Tehran authorities got the joke they didn't like it - and it would quickly came back to haunt Bahari when he was rousted from his family home and thrown into prison.

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.

On a building site in present-day Tehran, Lateef, a 17-year-old Turkish worker is irresistibly drawn to Rahmat, a young Afghan worker. The revelation of Rahmat's secret changes both their lives.

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

The story revolves around a blind boy named Mohammed who is released from his special school in Tehran for summer vacation. His father, shamed and burdened by Mohammed's blindness, arrives late to pick him up and then tries to convince the headmaster to keep Mohammed over the summer. The headmaster refuses, so Mohammed's father eventually takes him home.

Samad is nobody’s fool. The narcotics officer has seen his share of a drug dealer’s lies and games, and his patience has come to run thin. While searching for the infamous drug baron Nasser Khakzad, he and his colleague Hamid scour the streets of Tehran, turning an overcrowded prison on its head. With his rough and dubious approach, Samad finally manages to find the criminal’s whereabouts – but things do not quite go according to plan...

A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.

A sensation when released in 1999 in Iran, Two Women charts the lives of two promising architecture students over the course of the first turbulent years of the Islamic Republic. Tahimine Milani creates this scathing portrait of those traditions - aided by official indifference - which conspire to trap women and stop them from realizing their full potential; the inclusion of frank depictions of domestic violence was hailed by many as a breakthrough in dealing with a long taboo subject.

A headstrong young girl in Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban, disguises herself as a boy in order to provide for her family.

When an ostrich-rancher focuses on replacing his daughter's hearing aid, which breaks right before crucial exams, everything changes for a struggling rural family in Iran. Karim motorbikes into a world alien to him - incredibly hectic Tehran, where sudden opportunities for independence, thrill and challenge him. But his honor and honesty, plus traditional authority over his inventive clan, are tested, as he stumbles among vast cultural and economic gaps between his village nestled in the desert, and a throbbing international metropolis.

Divided by student protests and conflicting politics, college lovers Daniel and Mahtab are separated when Daniel flees Tehran. But Mahtab follows, travelling south to his village. As the lovers reunite and head back to Tehran, they find themselves trapped by flood waters in an abandoned battlefield, strewn with landmines and dead soldiers.

Tells the story of seven Iranian transgender individuals living in Tehran who live pieces of their own lives on the screen.

Dokumentation about the Journey of Patrick Allgair and Gwendolin Weisser, they travelled over 100.000 Kilometres on foot and by hitch-hiking. Starting in Freiburg, Germany they start travelling East, it took three and a half years and they came through Ukraine, Russia, China, Japan and Mexico on their way around the world.

Ghodrat Samadi wants to become a member of parliament, but he has a reputation for recklessness and taking arbitrary action. Deciding his best course of action is negotiating with assorted parties and politicians, none take him seriously until he's connected to a single, notorious incident.

Based on the story "The Heroes of Yucca," The Invincible Six features a ragtag group of jewel thieves who become the unofficial guardians of a small Iranian village. When bandits attack the village, looking for the body of their former leader and his treasure map, the Invincible Six are there to save the day, wooing the local females and frustrating the new leader of the bandits.

Against the tumultuous backdrop of Iran's 1953 CIA-backed coup d'état, the destinies of four women converge in a beautiful orchard garden, where they find independence, solace and companionship.

Golrokh, an Iranian author, struggles to settle her husband's debts caused by a business partner who left him to bear the consequences.

During the rule of Taliban in Afghanistan, about 3 million illegal Afghani immigrants entered Iran and caused numerous problems for the Iranian society to accept them. This film depicts the story of a 17 year old rural girl by the name of Mahi (Fish), who comes from a war-stricken family in southern Iran. Mahi falls in love with Heiran, an Afghan student who has come to their village to work. However, Mahi's family being strictly against her marriage to Heiran, force Mahi to choose one between her family and an Afghan boy.

This is the story of Tehran from the Qajar time (middle of 19th century) to today. Tehran has become a metropolis from a small village, now a developed city with many social problems.

Marzieh is a young female actress living in Tehran. The authorities ban her theatre work and, like all young people in Iran, she is forced to lead a secret life in order to express herself artistically. At an underground rave, she meets Iranian born Saman, now an Australian citizen, who offers her a way out of her country and the possibility of living without fear.

The lives of three strong-willed women and a young musician cross paths in Tehran’s schizophrenic society where sex, adultery, corruption, prostitution and drugs coexist with strict religious law. In this bustling modern metropolis, avoiding prohibition has become an everyday sport and breaking taboos can be a means of personal emancipation.

The story of this animation takes place in Tehran in year 2121 AD and is about the life of Akbar Agha (Mehran Modiri) and deals with social and cultural problems.

It’s 1988 and, at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran is bombed relentlessly. The days that pass are full of foreboding, and yet, love, affection, hope and life itself manage to sweep away the fear of death from those surrounded by it. Love may often be difficult to comprehend, but death is a horrible certitude. ‘Bomb, A Love Story’ shows how, even when faced with the darkness of death, love and hope will find a way.

Three lonely people, each looking for love in their own ways. This is hard enough in any big city – never mind in Tehran, where individual freedoms can’t be taken for granted. In a sexy voice on the telephone, an overweight receptionist seduces men who wouldn’t look twice at her real ‘me’. A former bodybuilding champion now earns a living as a personal trainer. When he develops feelings for a promising young sportsman as a client; he drops everything else; even a very promising acting job for a well-known French director. A singer at religious funerals is dumped by his fiancée. He tries to find new purpose in life by retraining as a singer at weddings and parties. That’s a lot more attractive to women, his friend assures him.

A young girl zealously wants to go to school and learn to read and write. Almost everywhere she is met with hostility or indifference. The only young boy who takes her to his school is thrown out by the teacher, because helping her prevented him from arriving in time. On her way home she and other girls are taken as prisoners by boys playing as Taliban fighters. They tear her school book to pieces and threaten to stone their female captives.

Bemani has spent ten years in jail for killing her husband. Her child was taken away in prison and allegedly given to her husband’s family. Temporarily released, she immediately starts looking for her son. Bemani goes to the car demolition workshop where Ebi, her brother-in-law, works, but he claims not to know anything about the boy’s fate. She finds out, however, that it was Ebi who sold the child to a rich family. Bemani tries to extract more information from the workers of the demolition shop, but they demand an indecent favour in return for the information. As a desperate mother, she is prepared to go to the extremes, but not in the way the men are hoping for.

On a pilgrimage to Mashad from Tehran, a couple's transportation breaks down, far from any major town. The husband, a photographer, seeks help at a nearby village and encounters a teacher who offers to help. Whilst the husband and teacher go off to find a spare part, the wife, who used to be a teacher, takes over the teaching lessons in the village. It is clear that the children live there, in this strange deserted place, without any men, save the teacher and an old signal guard. As the day draws on, the children help to bring a new hope and life into the wife's heart.

A Tehran mullah-in-training struggles to take care of his ailing wife and their children in this profoundly moving melodrama. A film of near-universal appeal, it puts a human face on Iran's Muslim clergy with its unusual tale of a man forced by hardship to become a better husband and father. Seyed Reza has just moved with his family to Tehran so he can study the Koran, and he relies on his lovely wife Zahra to look after their two young children and weave the intricate rugs that earn them a living. But one evening Zahra collapses and is taken to the hospital, where she's diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Scarcely able to process the tragedy, Seyed is left to cook, change diapers, walk his daughter to school and take his toddler son with him to his classes, where peers and elders treat him with scorn. But Seyed eventually learns to cope, his prayers and devotional studies taking on deeper meaning as he attends to the hard nightly work of rug weaving, getting through with a heavy ...

Tehran's air pollution has reached maximum levels because of thermal inversion. Unmarried 30-something Niloofar lives with her aged mother, and stays busy with her alterations shop. When doctors insist that her mother must leave smoggy Tehran for her respiratory health, Niloofar’s brother and family elders decide that she must also move away to accompany her mother. Now Niloofar is torn between family loyalty and living her own life. As the youngest she has always obeyed their orders. Can she stand up for herself this time?

A colonel, who has two daughters working as nurses in Tehran, retires to a small city. The man marries a teacher from the provinces and goes with her to Tehran. However, he finds that his daughters have changed. The elder daughter eventually commits suicide and the younger daughter goes through an ill-fated marriage. The father, observing the problems of his children, goes insane and is confined to an asylum. For its political and social content, the film was banned by the government for several years.

An Iranian diplomat who miraculously survived Taliban's raid on the Iranian consulate in Mazar E Sharif (Afghanistan) narrates his 19 days of hide and escape to reach Iran's borders meanwhile on the other side, the Iranian troops are preparing for retaliation.