Best movies like Maestra

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Maestra . If you liked Maestra then you may also like: Viva Cuba, We Were Strangers, Won't Back Down, Nightjohn, A Boy Named Sue and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.

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Cuba, 1961: 250,000 volunteers taught 700,000 people to read and write in one year. 100,000 of the teachers were under 18 years old. Over half were women. MAESTRA explores this story through the personal testimonies of the young women who went out to teach literacy in rural communities across the island - and found themselves deeply transformed in the process.

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Viva Cuba

The friendship between two children is threatened by their parents’ differences. Malú is from a family that was upper-class before the Revolution and remains well-to-do through remittances from relatives overseas, and her single mother (Larisa Vega Alamar) does not want her to play with Jorgito, as she thinks his background coarse and commonplace. Jorgito’s mother (Luisa María Jiménez Rodríguez),

We Were Strangers

China Valdes joins the Cuban underground after her brother is killed by the chief of the secret police, Ariete. She meets and falls in love with American expatriate Tony Fenner. Tony develops a plan to tunnel under the city's cemetery to a plot owned by a high official, assassinate him, and blow up the whole Cuban hierarchy at the ensuing state funeral. Together with a band of dedicated revolutionaries, they begin digging.

Won't Back Down

Jamie Fitzpatrick and Nona Alberts are two women from opposites sides of the social and economic track, but they have one thing in common: a mission to fix their community's broken school and ensure a bright future for their children. The two women refuse to let any obstacles stand in their way as they battle a bureaucracy that's hopelessly mired in traditional thinking, and they seek to re-energize a faculty that has lost its passion for teaching.

Nightjohn

John is a man of many talents, including one forbidden skill: he can read. When he teaches a young slave girl named Sarny to read and write, she learns an unforgettable lesson about the power of words and the true meaning of freedom.

A Boy Named Sue

A Boy Named Sue chronicles the transformation of a transsexual named Theo from a woman to a man over the course of six years. Following Theo's physiological and psychological changes during the process, as well as their effects on his lesbian lover and community of close friends, A Boy Named Sue tells a story about gender identity, relationships, and how even things that seem permanent can change.

Creature from the Haunted Sea

A crook decides to bump off members of his inept crew and blame their deaths on a legendary sea creature. What he doesn't know is that the creature is real.

Cuba

A British mercenary arrives in pre-Revolution Cuba to help train the corrupt General Batista's army against Castro's guerrillas while he also romances a former lover now married to an unscrupulous plantation owner.

Cuban Rebel Girls

Errol Flynn, playing himself as a war correspondent, reports the dangerous goings-on of a band of Cuban rebels- Two of which are misguided teenage girls from America. The film was shot with Castro's cooperation while he was still fighting Batista's forces.

Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights

In pre-revolution Cuba, Katey Miller is about to defy everyone's expectations. Instead of a parent-approved suitor, Katey is drawn to the sexy waiter, Javier, who spends his nights dancing in Havana's nightclubs. As she secretly learns to dance with Javier, she learns the meanings of love, sensuality and independence.

Fidel: The Untold Story

Documentary about Fidel Castro, covering 40 years of Cuban Revolution. Rare Fidel Castro footage: he appears swimming with a bodyguard, visiting his childhood home and school, playing with his friend Nelson Mandela, meeting kid Elián Gonzalez, and celebrating his birthday with the Buena Vista Social Club group.

Take the Lead

A former professional dancer volunteers to teach dance in the New York public school system and, while his background first clashes with his students' tastes, together they create a completely new style of dance. Based on the story of ballroom dancer, Pierre Dulane.

I Am Cuba

Four vignettes about the lives of the Cuban people set during the pre-revolutionary era.

Memories of Underdevelopment

In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs incident, Sergio chooses to stay behind in Cuba while his wife and family escape to neighboring Miami. Alone in a brave new world, Sergio observes the constant threat of foreign invasion while chasing young women all over Havana. He finally meets Elena, a young virgin girl he seeks to mould into the image of his ex-wife, but at what cost to himself?

Paper Clips

Whitwell, TN is a small, rural community of less than two thousand people nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. Its citizens are almost exclusively white and Christian. In 1998, the children of Whitwell Middle School took on an inspiring project, launched out of their principal's desire to help her students open their eyes to diversity in the world and the horrors and enormity of the holocaust.

The Survivors

A bourgeois Cuban family of aristocratic origin locks itself into its mansion when the Cuban Revolution comes to power, waiting for the new regime to be overthrown. As time passes, they regress to older and older systems of policital order, from capitalism to feudalism to "primitive savagery."

Wildflower

One day Sammy and his younger sister Ellie happen upon a cabin where Alice, a young, partially deaf girl with epilepsy is being kept by her abusive stepfather. The three soon become friends and hope to get Alice an education and help her escape from the torture she undergoes daily. However, Alice's stepfather soon finds out about the friendship Alice has struck up and punishes her brutally. This story of friendship and youth shows that everyone is human and deserves to be treated so, no matter their disability or weakness.

Bitter Sugar

A patriot (René Lavan) with a rebellious brother falls in love with a dissident's daughter (Mayte Vilán) in Castro's Cuba.

Havana

An American professional gambler named Jack Weil decides to visit Havana, Cuba to gamble. On the boat to Havana, he meets Roberta Duran, the wife of a revolutionary, Arturo. Shortly after their arrival, Arturo is taken away by the secret police, and Roberta is captured and tortured. Jack frees her, but she continues to support the revolution.

The Explosive Generation

Peter Gifford is a likable, dedicated schoolteacher that teaches a senior life skills class. When student Janet Sommers brings up the topic of sex and dating, he asks students to write questions on the topic, and will cover them in the next class. The parents get wind of what Gifford is about to do, notify the principal, and he warns Peter not to read the questions in class. Gifford decides to go against this and is suspended. The whole student body protests, and the administration gets worried on what to do.

Schoolhouse Rocked: The Homeschool Revolution

A once reluctant homeschool family sells their home and everything in it, packs up in an RV and travels the country to tell the story of the millions of American families who are a part of the Homeschool Revolution. After talking with education experts, homeschooling pioneers, and regular families at every step in their home education journey, they learn come away convinced that it's time for America to bring their children home. The movie follows host, Yvette Hampton, as she travels the country with her family talking with education experts, curriculum developers, college and university faculty and administrators, and homeschooling families at every stage in the process, from kindergarten to college graduation and beyond. As viewers follow Yvette on this journey and share in her challenges and victories as a homeschool mom, they will gather the necessary resources and encouragement to homeschool their own children with excellence.

The Gun Runners

Remake of "To Have and Have Not" based on Hemingway short story. Plot reset to early days of Cuban revolution. A charter boat skipper gets entangled in gunrunning scheme to get money to pay off debts. Sort of a sea-going film noir with bad girl, smarmy villain, and the "innocent" drawn into wrong side of law by circumstances.

The Twelve Chairs

When her country is taken over by socialist revolutionaries, a wealthy woman can't bear to give up all of her wealth and possessions to the new government, so she hides all of her treasures in the 12 chairs of a dining-room set. After her death her nephew finds out what she had done and, since the chairs had been "nationalized" and are now in the possession of a dozen different people, he sets out to track them down and get the treasures he believes rightfully belong to him.

Papa Hemingway in Cuba

In 1959, a young journalist ventures to Havana, Cuba to meet his idol, the legendary Ernest Hemingway who helped him find his literary voice, while the Cuban Revolution comes to a boil around them.

Company Man

Set in the 1960's, a school teacher pretends to be a CIA spy to get his nagging wife off his back. He helps a Russian ballet dancer defect and is then sent to Cuba to locate "Agent X" for the CIA.

Mental: A History of the Madhouse

Documentary which tells the fascinating and poignant story of the closure of Britain's mental asylums. In the post-war period, 150,000 people were hidden away in 120 of these vast Victorian institutions all across the country. Today, most mental patients, or service users as they are now called, live out in the community and the asylums have all but disappeared. Through powerful testimonies from patients, nurses and doctors, the film explores this seismic revolution and what it tells us about society's changing attitudes to mental illness over the last sixty years.

Finding Fidel: The Journey of Erik Durschmied

Finding Fidel tells the remarkable story of war cameraman Erik Durschmied, who in 1958 journeyed to Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains to interview a little-known rebel leader named Fidel Castro. A month later, Castro's band of fighters rolled into Havana, and the world would never be the same. Finding Fidel follows Durschmied as he returns to Cuba on the 50th Anniversary of the Revolution, retracing his original route to the mountains after an ailing Fidel has handed power over to his brother Raul and the island is waiting for change.

Mr. Pip

As a war rages on in the province of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, a young girl becomes transfixed by the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, which is being read at school by the only white man in the village. In 1991, a war over a copper mine in the South Pacific tore the island of Bougainville apart. The reclusive “Popeye” (Hugh Laurie) offers the children in fourteen-year-old Matilda’s tiny village an escape with Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. But on an island at war, fiction can have dangerous consequences.

Yankee Comandante

Two people rose to the rank of comandante during the Cuban Revolution. One was Che Guevara. The other was a man from Ohio.

Two Loves

American-born Anna Vorontosov teaches school in a remote, primitive section of northern New Zealand. Her experimental teaching methods have won her the love and affection of her pupils and their parents and the admiration of the unhappily married school inspector, Abercrombie. Her personal life, however, is less secure; frightened of love and sexually inhibited, she has always been aloof with men. Eager to break down this barrier is Englishman Paul Lathrope, a somewhat irrational and immature fellow teacher who aspires to be a singer. Though Anna is attracted to him, she refuses to submit to his advances.

The Silly Age

The "edad de la peseta" or silly age is the term used in Cuba for the pre-adolescent period from the age of seven to the age of eleven. Set in 1958 in Havana, the year that culminates the Revolution, ten-year-old Samuel has just arrived in town with his recently divorced mother. They take up residence in the house of his eccentric grandmother Violeta, and Samuel is introduced to a new, mysterious world where Samuel finds himself an adult in comparison to his child-like mother.

Cuba Dances

Featured in a musical environment possible light anywhere in the world, adapted to a Cuban city makes good use of music. The argument is based on the desires and efforts of middle-income families, to hold a quinceanera at a level greater than that permitted by the economic status of a family.

Guaguasi

A story about a simple man from the mountains, Guaguasi, who falls in love with a beautiful chorus girl, Marina, during the Cuban Revolution. Guaguasi joins the rebels and arrives in Havana at the end of Batista's dictatorship, and, in the midst of political turmoil, is swept off his feet by the mesmerising Marina. The story celebrates the vitality and lunacy of the Revolution period with surrealism, humor and sensuality and is a compassionate metaphor about the human condition.

The American Trap

The world is still reeling from the assassination of JFK - but has yet to lose his kid brother Bobby. In the midst of all this, a reluctant hero by the name of Lucien Rivard becomes enmeshed in a web of global political intrigue and corruption.

Clandestinos

In 1950s Havana, a romance blooms between two young revolutionaries whose clandestine printing press publishes pamphlets meant to stir up rebellion against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. As their popularity grows, so, too, does their revolutionary zeal and their desire to mobilize other urban guerilla units.

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