Best movies like On Her Shoulders

Three children living in a displacement camp in northern Uganda compete in their country's national music and dance festival.

Follow a group of international journalists into the heart of the once cosmopolitan city of Sarajevo—now a danger zone of sniper and mortar attacks where residents still live. While reporting on an American aid worker who’s trying to get children out of the country, a British correspondent decides to take an orphaned girl home to London.

A fictional documentary discusses the effects the Iraq war has had on soldiers and local people through interviews with members of an American military unit, the media, and local Iraqis.

Two westerners, a priest and a teacher find themselves in the middle of the Rwandan genocide and face a moral dilemna. Do they place themselves in danger and protect the refugees, or escape the country with their lives? Based on a true story.

An ex-mercenary turned smuggler. A Mende fisherman. Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed countrywide.

A hitchhiking woman is abducted by a young couple and held captive for seven years, during which time she's tortured and forced to live as a slave to her captors.

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.

In 1915 a man survives the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, but loses his family, speech and faith. One night he learns that his twin daughters may be alive, and goes on a quest to find them.

A group of women in an isolated religious colony struggle to reconcile their faith with a series of sexual assaults committed by the colony's men.

In a dystopicly polluted rightwing religious tyranny, a young woman is put in sexual slavery on account of her now rare fertility.

Inspired by true events, this film takes place in Rwanda in the 1990s when more than a million Tutsis were killed in a genocide that went mostly unnoticed by the rest of the world. Hotel owner Paul Rusesabagina houses over a thousand refuges in his hotel in attempt to save their lives.

When ISIS took their homes, families and city, one group of men fought to take it all back. Based on true events, this is the story of the Nineveh SWAT team, a renegade police unit who waged a guerrilla operation against ISIS in a desperate struggle to save their home city of Mosul.

Two stories separated by 1400 years. After losing his mother in the midst of a war-torn country, an Iraqi child learns the importance and power of patience by discovering the historical story of Lady Fatima and her suffering.

Longinotto's documentary is about Brenda Myers-Powell, who fights against sexual exploitation and supports prostitutes in Chicago. Brenda knows what she is talking about: her own story, involving teenage prostitution and a life of violence and abuse, is in stark contrast to her dauntless energy and optimism.

A 5-year-old girl embarks on a harrowing quest for survival amid the sudden rise and terrifying reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

A young refugee of the Sudanese Civil War who wins a lottery for relocation to the United States with three other lost boys. Encountering the modern world for the first time, they develop an unlikely friendship with a brash American woman assigned to help them, but the young man struggles to adjust to this new life and his feelings of guilt about the brother he left behind.

A sweeping drama set in the chaotic aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, where the life of top UN diplomat Brazilian Sérgio Vieira de Mello hangs in the balance during the most treacherous mission of his career.

This winner of the 1993 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature details the case that the 1989 invasion of Panama by the US was motivated not by the need to protect American soldiers, restore democracy or even capture Noriega. It was to force Panama to submit the will of the United States after Noriega had exhausted his usefulness.

Four women are given into the custody of the Magdalene sisterhood asylum to correct their sinful behavior: Crispina and Rose have given birth to a premarital child, Margaret got raped by her cousin and the orphan Bernadette had been repeatedly caught flirting with the boys. All have to work in a laundry under the strict supervision of the nuns, who break their wills through sadistic punishment.

James, down on his luck and desperate for some quick cash, agrees to drive a small truck across country. He soon realizes that he's made a huge mistake and has inadvertently become involved in a dangerous human trafficking ring. The unlikely hero risks it all to shut down the trafficking ring and save the woman he is falling in love with.

Canadian Lt. General Romeo Dallaire was the military commander of the UN mission in Rwanda and this movie is personal and, all too true, story of his time there during the genocide of 1994. It is not quite as moving as the earlier Hotel Rwanda and is less geared to drama and emotional manipulation, but it is still grim and upsetting.

The story of Canadian Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire and his controversial command of the United Nations mission to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. The documentary was inspired by the book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda which was published in 2003.

A young writer is interrogated by a sadistic secret policeman. She is accused of embedding political messages in her children's stories. The entire movie takes place in one room, with only the two actors. The movie is set in an unidentified, modern police state.

A story of forbidden love in a dystopian future where teleportation technology enables two refugees to escape genocide. When they trust the wrong back-alley teleporter, Ekaterina and Anya are separated. In a desperate attempt to be reunited, our heroines are entwined in an insidious human trafficking ring involving corrupt politicians.

A Texas cop, whose own daughter might have been forced into sexual slavery, joins forces with a Mexican youth to find the boy's sister, who was abducted and forced into prostitution. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian woman who was promised a better life in America also becomes a victim.

As three fathers fight to save their families, their lives become interwined in an unlikely journey across the globe, where they learn the healing power of forgiveness and reconciliation.

TORTURED FEMALES is one of few surviving films distributed by super-cheap Mitam Productions, which was essentially like a west coast version of New York City's Distribpix.

The Human Shield is a 1991 film directed by Ted Post. It stars Michael Dudikoff and Tommy Hinkley. It is about a former government agent who must save his diabetic brother from Iraqi abductors.

A tale about Vietnamese refugees sent to an orientation camp on the Camp Pendleton Marine Base in California, 'Green Dragon' focuses on a young boy and his sister. Set in 1975, the film chronicles the stories told to the two children by other refugees in the camp and of Tai Tran, who dares to introduce himself to Sergeant Jim Lance. In developing a relationship with Lance, Tran is able to improve

Someone is stealing cheerleaders and other pretty girls and selling them to the highest bidder. Female super sexy spy Ginger is soon employed to investigate the disappearances. She does so by going undercover with a fellow agent and doing whatever is necessary to put an end to the operation and take down the leaders.

The story of the post World War II Jewish refugee situation from liberation to the establishment of the modern state of Israel.

Inspired by the transformation of the sex-trafficking survivors whose lives she follows, the filmmaker finds the courage to break the silence about sexual abuse in her own life.

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

The Devil Never Sleeps is a “whodunit” documentary about family secrets. Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo received a phone call informing her of the mysterious death of her wealthy Mexican uncle Oscar. Officially ruled a suicide, Portillo’s relatives claimed murder, offering several possible suspects including a business partner, a ranch hand, and Oscar’s young widow who stood to inherit everything. Traveling to Mexico, Portillo attempts to learn the truth about her powerful uncle. Using interviews, old snapshots and home movies, she finds a complicated web of family secrets, intrigue, rumor and betrayal that makes her enigmatic uncle’s murder seem ever more likely, yet ever more obscure. As the Mexican saying goes, “When evil is lurking, the devil never sleeps.”

Daniel Grudge, a wealthy industrialist and fierce isolationist long embittered by the loss of his son in World War II, is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve who lead him to reconsider his attitude toward his fellow man.

A serial killer that hates woman because he can't attract them goes on a killing spree.

The film centers on a pair of young lovers; Bapiste is more than ready to have sex with his girlfriend Josette, but she refuses, arguing that when they are married they can have all the sex they would like. Meanwhile, powerful Hutu leaders have had enough of Tutsi rebels and call on all Hutus to kill their Tutsi neighbors. As chaos breaks out, the Tutsis flee and the lovers are separated. Josette and her family find solace in a Catholic church run by a sadistic priest. The Catholic Church, the state, and the French army look the other way as bloodshed ensues. Josette is taken as a "wife" by the priest and repeatedly raped. When the Belgian army sent in to protect the church is called away on an emergency, the Hutus attack and massacre hundreds of women and children. Josette miraculously survives, but she is only a husk of the woman that she was. As the Tutsis regroup, they exact terrible revenge.

A former Confederate robs stagecoaches to be able to give money to the local poor people. He soon runs into a gang of robbers who don't have the same good intentions he does.

When a planeload of Pakistani orphans are shipped to his state for permanent relocation, the governor of Idaho defies the president and closes the state's border. News Net Television, a cable news program that makes hay by reporting on political scandals, quickly spins the racist act into an overnight media sensation, creating a divide in national opinion over the issue.

Tom Price, an ex-LA mob enforcer, travels to the Philippines to investigate the mysterious death of his brother Charlie. Tom's investigation turns to catastrophe, and he must employ all the tricks of the trade to stay alive.

Political satire has Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet story updated for the cold war era, with the children of the US and Russian ambassadors falling in love.

Josh, a small town carpenter, finds himself at the center of a national media story when his touch brings a twelve year-old boy, who fell into a freezing lake, back to life. Although many consider it a miraculous act, Josh isn't convinced he has done anything special - even after he seemingly heals several others. Thrust into a whirlwind he never expected, Josh must make a decision that could change his life and the lives of those he cares about most.

In this undercover investigation, Nawal al-Maghafi exposes a secret world of sexual exploitation in Iraq. Some Shia clerics are using a controversial practice called ‘pleasure marriage’ to groom vulnerable girls and young women and pimp them out.

For more than 70 years, the UN has been at the forefront of work to uphold human rights and promote global peace. But what happens when the fixer of the world’s problems is itself faced with allegations of wrongdoing and corruption? What happens when UN staff try to call out their own managers and colleagues?

In a typically mixed Baghdadi neighbourhood in 2006, a community of ordinary people try to live their everyday lives amidst the threat of unpredictable violence. At the heart of these intersecting stories we find Sara, a single mother and novelist, who regains her will to write after witnessing the forced exile of her Christian neighbour and best friend Sabiha. With the news of Saddam Hussein's sudden execution shortly before the New Year, Sara and her neighbours brace themselves for an uncertain future. Yet, like a miracle, each is able to sustain a fragile sense of hope.

The Sunshine is about a young refugee (Armstrong) who flees from the war-torn northern Sri Lanka and embarks on a perilous journey through India, Nepal, Thailand towards an uncertain destination, leaving his childhood sweetheart on the shores that foam blood. The film looks back at the perils faced by Armstrong, a Sri Lankan Tamil, along with his epic odyssey from conflict and violence-ridden homeland, towards far corners of the world risking death, detention and deportation over the lands and seas. The Sunshine will explore the ultimate universal question how and why people get prepared to risk everything. The movie will tell the story of human struggle and not just merely make a political statement. Director Leena Manimekalai says, The Sunshine is unique and personal because it has the autobiographical touch of her friend and writer Shobasakthi.

ABDUCTION: The town of Process is located somewhere in rural New Jersey. It's been in existence for over 100 years, although it's not on any known map. It's a nice place to visit, with lovely shops and friendly people. That is unless you are single, young, healthy and good looking! It's even worse if you are a female of childbearing age. The town has a very lucrative underground and Internet business specializing in selling human organs for transplant, selling babies to loving couples who are barren and auctioning young women into sex slavery.

An Iraqi journalist joins an army of uneasy allies and unforgettable characters in the epic battle to liberate the city of Mosul from the Islamic State.

"LIFE WILL KNOCK YOU DOWN. THIS FILM WILL PICK YOU UP." This true story is about ordinary people who discover that faith happens in the midst of lifes twists and turns. Every incident in this film is based on actual events that came from the same small church. What do a drug addict, a feisty old lady, an African refugee, an ex-boxer, a salesman and a Chinese entrepreneur have in common? They are all connected through Heights Community Church.

An intimate and moving portrait of one of the most remarkable women in American history. It is the story of a lonely, unhappy child who became the most admired and respected woman in the world. Richard Kaplan's lively documentary reveals the human face behind the American icon, beginning with the emotional deprivation suffered by this plain, awkward little girl born into a socially prominent and powerful family. Though she would eventually marry a man who would look beyond her awkwardness, Eleanor was not content to be the proper, silent wife to her husband Franklin's extraordinary political career. Instead, she began a lifelong crusade to speak out about injustice and oppression in any form. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.