Best movies like Ladder to Damascus

A young man aspires to follow in his father's footsteps and live up to his legacy of resisting the Zionist occupation. He reflects on his father's journey from his arrival in Quneitra in 1936 to his death after the Zionist army captured the city.

A reclusive man conducts a series of interviews with human souls for a chance to be born.

Talal Derki returns to his homeland where he gains the trust of a radical Islamist family, sharing their daily life for over two years. His camera focuses on Osama and his younger brother Ayman, providing an extremely rare insight into what it means to grow up in an Islamic Caliphate.

A Jewish woman is recruited to help track down a German commander who was her former husband.

Salem dreams of being an actor but is still working in a gas station, only his love for Nada can make things easier for him.

With unprecedented access, this documentary follows the extraordinary journey of “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently”—a group of anonymous citizen journalists who banded together after their homeland was overtaken by ISIS—as they risk their lives to stand up against one of the greatest evils in the world today.

Paul is agonising over his interpretation of 'Uncle Vanya' and, paralysed by anxiety, stumbles upon a solution via a New Yorker article about a high-tech company promising to alleviate suffering by extracting souls. He enlists their services—only to discover that his soul is the shape and size of a chickpea.

A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.

A mother attempts to keep her family safe as war rages and a sniper lies in wait outside her home.

Hunter, a newly pregnant housewife, finds herself increasingly compelled to consume dangerous objects. As her husband and his family tighten their control over her life, she must confront the dark secret behind her new obsession.

Zurich, 1905. 19-year-old Russian Sabina Spielrein is put by her parents in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from a severe form of hysteria and refusing to eat. A compassionate doctor, Carl Gustav Jung, takes her under his care and, for the first time, experiments with the psychoanalytical method of his teacher Sigmund Freud. Thus is born a sweeping story of love and passion, of body and soul, soaring to the utmost heights, but also plunging to the darkest depths of the 20th century.

Fatima is a Toronto-born modern muslim girl raised in a family of mixed-cultures and mixed messages about what her role in the world is. She gets sucked into the empowering world of a sexy Burlesque cabaret, and unleashes her brave and confident Burlesque identity, “Babylon”. Then she must reconcile her old self with her new.

Grace Leonard, a typical woman of the New York stage, beautiful but old in sin, seduces William Craig, who becomes a thief in order to shower luxuries upon her. He is sentenced to prison and emerges five years later as a sad-faced, gray-haired man, entirely cured of his mad passion for La Valencia. But she sees him and her old passion is stirred, meaning nothing to her that since his release from prison, he has fallen in love and married a good woman who knows nothing of his past. When William is not swayed by her fascinations, Grace threatens to expose his past life.

Three boys grow up in war torn Syria.

An unfiltered look at the former First Lady of ISIS, Tania Joya, who for twelve years was married to John Georgelas, the highest ranking American in ISIS.

The inspiring story of three women risking their lives to incite political, activist, and armed uprisings in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.

Three generations of women spend an emotional weekend that will change them forever.

For Walid, a taxi driver in Damascus, the only place he can steal a private kiss with his love, Suhair, is in his car. When Suhair is invited by her friend to visit Tehran, she and Walid together board a train from the Syrian capital to Tehran. As they follow the stunning scenery captured beautifully on film, Walid and Suhair finally have an opportunity to get to know each other outside of his taxi…

Twenty-five years ago Adib, a promising young officer in the Syrian military police, suddenly left Damascus under suspicious circumstances. Abandoning the love of his life Fatima, he made his way to Canada and wiped the slate clean. When his daughter Muna suddenly disappears in Damascus, his past threatens to violently catch up to him. Teaming up with a Canadian emissary, Adib must now confront the turmoil he thought he left behind in order to find Muna.

In the film that marks the emergence of auteur cinema in Syria, a young widow and her children are forced to move to Damascus, where the boys come of age against the backdrop of the military coups that punctuated the 1950s.

Historian William Dalrymple journeys to Morocco, Turkey, Syria and Pakistan to explore whirling dervishes, Qawwali singing and other forms of music sacred in Sufism, the branch of Islam that emphasizes music as a mystical route to the holy. Capturing performances of renowned Muslim musicians such as Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Sain Zahoor, the film reveals that at the heart of Sufism lies a dedication to tolerance and pluralism.

After visiting her father's grave, Lilly and her mother are involved in a terrible car accident leaving Lilly orphaned and unable to see. In her youth, she struggles with her blindness and begins to hear voices. Unbeknownst to her they don't belong to the living. After years of learning to cope, Lilly is now happily married with a baby on the way. Lilly soon discovers her unborn baby has become a vessel a second chance for souls stuck in limbo to be re-born. She only has until the baby's first heartbeat to decide which soul will be re-born through her. Now the voices she heard in her youth have returned, clamoring for the chance to come back. Among the voices, she befriends the spirit of a little girl tied to a years-old cold case. Lilly finds herself in a desperate struggle with the girl's murderers and the souls vying to be born again.

Haas is an 18-year-old girl who was raised by her father in the rural Midwest. When her father suddenly dies, she must carry out his wish to be buried in the town where he was born. There, she meets a young man named Will, a lonely, creative soul who is working to support his family back home. The two of them form a friendship that challenges both of their understandings of love and loss.

1600 years after his birth, Tearlach O'Rian works to save souls from hell while battling his own demons.

An artist is plagued by nightmares of a love triangle and murder. A psychic says the dream figure is his brother, a "troubled soul" from an ancient past life. Nearly born as his twin but miscarried, this past life rival now breaks through in nightmares in attempt to repeat history.

Teenager Joana feeds her soul with literature and rock. In 1979, when amnesty is granted in Brazil, she's forced to move with her family from Paris back to the country she barely remembers. Back in the city she was born in, and where her father was forcedly disappeared, she recovers pieces of memory from a fragmented childhood in Rio de Janeiro. Not everything is real, not everything is imagination. And as she remembers, Joana must write her own story in the present tense.

Monty meets an actress from a 1939 movie who looks exactly like she did then, complete with a black and white hue, specks of dust and vertical scratches throughout her face and body.

A love story grows between a young man and a girl, there is a second person who loves the girl, and for her he tries to hang himself, so the lovers decide to sacrifice love and happiness to save a human soul, the lover is a simple young man, while the girl is a loving female, mixed in the depths of many worlds of childhood and innocence And intelligence, the girl marries the man she does not like, and by this she has lifted the gallows from his neck, in order to wrap her around her neck.

Zilan, a young woman, returns to her home town looking for traces of her dead brother, killed by ISIS. But her town is not what it used to be: social and political tensions have escalated into a state of war. The people have risen up to demand their political autonomy and the police and army repress them with brutal force. But the city’s resistance will go on for more than 100 days and Zilan will not remain a passive witness. Based on the diaries of those who died fighting and the testimony of survivors, who are the protagonists of the film, Çelik's first feature explores concepts such as hope, friendship, sacrifice and loss in the struggle for freedom of a group of young people.

A Syrian exile living in Australia returns when his brother is taken into custody by the Assad regime in 2011.

A film inspired on the true story of the two abducted children of Janneke Schoonhoven. She struggled 2 years to get her abducted children back to Holland, from the father that took them to Syria.

Some university students change their views on sex after hearing a lecture on the blind Syrian philosopher Al-Maarri. He gets his way with one of them after sneaking what I imagine is rufees into one of their drinks which has disastrous consequences. After going to some wild bellydancing parties they are ensnared by a polyester-clad drug-dealer and womanizer/rapist. The victims' friends plan to avenge her with the help of the local police. Includes numerous musical numbers and belly dancing scenes.

Three tales of twisted terror. A man becomes obsessed with the stage hypnotist that gives his wife a hypnotic orgasm; a kinky rendezvous in a sleazy motel ends in bloodshed; and a depraved producer who preys on actresses is targeted for revenge by witches.

Deep beneath the surface in the Syrian province of Ghouta, a group of female doctors have established an underground field hospital. Under the supervision of paediatrician Dr. Amani and her staff of doctors and nurses, hope is restored for some of the thousands of children and civilian victims of the ruthless Syrian civil war.