Best movies like Iron Moon

24 City chronicles the dramatic closing of a once-prosperous state-owned factory in Chengdu, southwest China and its conversion into a sprawling luxury apartment complex. Three generations, eight characters : old workers, factory executives and yuppies, their stories melt into the History of China.

For Jimmy Smith, Jr., life is a daily fight just to keep hope alive. Feeding his dreams in Detroit's vibrant music scene, Jimmy wages an extraordinary personal struggle to find his own voice - and earn a place in a world where rhymes rule, legends are born and every moment… is another chance.

Observations of three varied corners of China’s garment industry: workers in a large-scale production line factory; a designer who rallies against the mass-machine-production of clothes and has created the eponymous hand-made collection called ‘Useless’ (Wuyong) for Paris Fashion Week; and finally the simple life of increasingly out-of-work tailors in small town Fengdang.

Li Li, intelligent young woman is working in a mill Xian'an. The company knows the difficulties. Her husband, who worked in the same company, was among the first laid off and has launched a small business (fish). They have a little boy, Bing Bing. Tired, Li Li will visit the hospital. The verdict: acute leukemia. The bone marrow is financially out of reach. Rest chemotherapy less effective but require her husband to sell the family home. In addition, Li Li needs a little freedom to live a little for herself and get answers before ... She goes to Beijing to visit the one she was in love ten years ago, and who was not accepted by her parents.

Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet, is invited to perform at a Poetry Festival in Shiraz, Iran, but she’d rather be in Paris. She lives at home with her over-protective Chinese grandparents and has never been anywhere by herself. Once in Iran, she finds herself in the company of poets and Persians, all who tell her stories that force her to confront her past; the Iranian father she assumed abandoned her and the nature of Poetry itself. It’s about building bridges between cultural and generational divides. It’s about being curious. Staying open. And finding your own voice through the magic of poetry. Rosie goes on an unwitting journey of forgiveness, reconciliation, and perhaps above all, understanding, through learning about her father’s past, her own cultural identity, and her responsibility to it.

Follows a crew as they work under a deadline set by their boss to complete the demolition of a building. Touches on the lives of several of the crew in their lives away from the job and shows rhe comraderie of the crew in their work and even away from work.

Lucy Hill is an ambitious up-and-coming executive living in Miami. She loves her shoes, she loves her cars and she loves climbing the corporate ladder. When she is offered a temporary assignment — in the middle of nowhere — to restructure a manufacturing plant, she jumps at the opportunity, knowing that a big promotion is close at hand. What begins as a straightforward assignment becomes a life-changing experience as Lucy discovers greater meaning in her life and, most unexpectedly, the man of her dreams.

A retired widow has her daily routine derailed when she starts receiving mysterious, anonymous phone calls.

Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.

The humdrum existence of a Beijing factory worker and his family is disrupted when their beloved dog is confiscated by the police for being unlicensed. The worker has but 24 hours to raise the sizable sum required to pay the license fee.

Four students in Shanghai have recently finished university. All are unemployed. Xu contemplates suicide but his friend Zhao talks him out of it. Zhao lives in a shabby room with just a flimsy wall of planks separating him from the room behind. Miss Yang, in town to take a factory job, moves in behind. Her nails into the wall knock Zhao's photos down. The unseen neighbours start playing tit for tat... Zhao gets a job as proofreader at a newspaper. He sees that pretty girl on the tram to work every day. He doesn't know her, but it's Miss Yang... Zhao is assigned to cover labour conditions for the paper. He is sent to a factory, the one where Miss Yang works...

When a young girl, Ai Qin, pays $25,000 to be smuggled into the UK in order to support her family back in China, she becomes another one of 3 million migrant workers that have become the bedrock of our economy. Forced to live with eleven other Chinese people in a two bedroom house, they work in factories preparing food for British supermarkets. Risking their lives for pennies these unprotected workers end up cockling in Morcombe Bay at night.

When a western Pennsylvania auto plant is acquired by a Japanese company, brokering auto worker Hunt Stevenson faces the tricky challenge of mediating the assimilation of two clashing corporate cultures. At one end is the Japanese plant manager and the sycophant who is angling for his position. At the other, a number of disgruntled long-time union members struggle with the new exigencies of Japanese quality control.

Tech entrepreneur Jimmy Van Horn arrives in China armed with an invention and confidence, only to learn that being American is not enough to succeed.

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century – the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now… the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

Naive Stanley Windrush returns from the war, his mind set on a successful career in business. Much to his own dismay, he soon finds he has to start from the bottom and work his way up, and also that the management as well as the trade union use him as a tool in their fight for power.

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.

In 2002, Ju Anqi made a film about a tour by the poet Shu through Xinjiang, the most western-lying, autonomous Uyghur province of China. All that we know about Shu is that he plays a poet who sends himself on a business trip - an absurd, satirical starting point that sets the tone for the film. For a variety of reasons, it was not until 2013 that Ju started editing the rough, lyrical material that he had shot in what is now a very restless Xinjiang: it's like an excellent wine that has had time to mature. Structured around 16 poems which he wrote on the road, Shu’s physically exhausting journey takes him along endless rocky roads, passing shabby inns and through impressive landscapes from one prostitute to the next. In its documentary authenticity, Poet on a Business Trip is also an historic document that exudes an atmosphere of loss, providing an unsentimental yet melancholy glimpse of a country in transition and a mirror for the existential irreversibility of time. (c) iffr.com

Xu Daqin, a retired Chinese factory worker, returns to the remote Yunnan province, where he hopes to reconcile himself with the life and opportunity he passed up in this place 40 years ago.

David Bowie went to America for the first time to promote his third album, The Man Who Sold the World. There, he embarked on a coast-to-coast publicity tour. During this tour, Bowie came up with the idea of his iconic Ziggy Stardust character, inspired by artists like Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

In this wartime musical, a feisty singer working in a London dive swears that she will become a star. She gets a job in an airplane plant when she learns that her fiance, a producer, and his partner are looking for new talent at the war factories. While working there, the woman meets a handsome RAF officer and falls in love. This causes some trouble.

Two married couples adjust to the vast social and economic changes taking place in China from the 1980s to the present.

An aged father and his younger, mentally challenged son have been working hard every day to keep the bathhouse running for a motley group of regular customers. When his elder son, who left years ago to seek his fortune in the southern city of Shenzhen, abruptly returns one day, it once again puts under stress the long-broken father-son ties. Presented as a light-hearted comedy, Shower explores the value of family, friendship, and tradition.

Five defense workers on their way to the munitions factory tell their stories: a refugee from the French Resistance, a frustrated race car driver, a prison warden, a former Miss America, and an intellectual who dropped out of society and saw the country as a bum.

This movie is adapted from the novel Heroes in Tongbai. Xiao Hua, a sister of Zhao Yongsheng, is deserted by her poor family. He Xiangdong, a woodworker, adopts her and rename her He Cuigu. To steer clear of arrest by the enemy, Dong Hongguo, offspring of a revolutionary family, is renamed Xiao Hua so as to be adopted by her adopter. Later, Zhao Yongsheng's parents are killed by the enemy, he joins the Liberation Army. In 1947, when Zhao Yongsheng returns to his own village Tongbai, his sister Xiao Hua happens to find her brother. Doctor Zhou who works in the hospital of the army, adopts Xiao Hua without knowing she is her own daughter. He Cuigu has become a well-known guerrilla hero after she grows up. She doesn't recognize her brother Zhao Yongsheng when she carries him on the stretcher. After the war, Zhao Yongsheng, Xiao Hua and Cuigu meet each other happily; Dong Xiangkun and Doctor Zhou also feel happy to reunite with their own daughter after 17 years of departure.

The daily life of the Dalai Lama is brought home with remarkable intimacy in SUNRISE/SUNSET. Granted total access to His Holiness for 24 hours, this is a day in the life of the Dalai Lama from when he wakes up at 3 a.m. until his bedtime at dusk.

In the 1990s, a group of students on the campus of the Chinese Southern Academy of Arts are pursuing their studies and preparing to face the world. China is opening up to the West and the students’ lives are a tangle of love stories and friendships, artistic research, ideals and ambitions brought about by new influences. Caught between tradition and modernity, they have to decide who they want to become.

20-year-old Jing Hao came to Shenzhen to live with his young sister alone. The siblings live a warm yet straitened life. In an effort to pay for his sister's expensive surgery, Jing Hao gets an opportunity by chance, thinking that a better life is coming, but unexpectedly encounters a serious setback. Under the pressure of both time and money, Jing Hao, who has no way out, decides to take a desperate gamble. Can this ignite the spark of hope for his troubled ordinary life?

Gao Yuan (Peng Yuchang), a high school student, diagnoses with muscular dystrophy and learns that his life is running out of days. He decides to achieve his only wish of being a true man before he dies. Knowing that, his best friends, Xu Hao (Wang Talu) and Zhang Zhengyang (Wei Daxun), struggle to make Gao Yuan’s last wish come true.

Studying in Hong Kong but living in Shenzhen, Peipei has spent 16 years in her life travelling between these two cities. To realize the dream of seeing snow in Japan with her bestie, Peipei joins a smuggling gang and uses her student identity to smuggle iPhones from Hong Kong to Mainland. Her family life and friendships begin to fall apart. The daily life of Peipei starts to get out of control.

The film 'Seven Intellectuals In Bamboo Forest' is based on the history of seven talented intellectuals from the ancient Chinese Wei and Jin Dynasties. Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Shan Tao, Liu Ling, Ruan Yan, Xiang Xiu and Wang Rong were famous poets and artists at that time. Open and unruly, they used to gather and drink in the bamboo forest, singing songs and playing traditional Chinese musical instruments, in the hope of escaping from earthly life. They pursued individuality, freedom, and liberty. Their remarkable talent and passion made them a notable group in Chinese history. Part 5 is about the return to the city and to reality. We live in the city and belong to it. If any problem arises, we are able to solve it.

In the Japanese war, a village on the edge of Chinese-controlled territory faces constant attacks. The leaders and the people of the village and other nearby villages join together to form a militia and plant land-mines to halt the Japanese.

A poet working in a mine and his doting wife dream of a better future, but on a visit to the mine, a famed poet exerts a subtle effect on the couple. This drama eloquently depicts the love-hate relationship between people in changing times.

A worker from Shenzhen falls in love with a girl from a rich family. This movie simply praises such pure love.

In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.