Best movies like The Runner

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.

An examination of the work and lives of actresses in the Iranian film industry prior to the 1979 revolution, featuring myriad interviews and rare film clips.

A Texan begins a cross-country journey in hope of finding the empty loft she keeps seeing in visions.

Zohre's shoes are gone; her older brother Ali lost them. They are poor, there are no shoes for Zohre until they come up with an idea: they will share one pair of shoes. School awaits.

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.

An old villager deeply in love with his cow goes to the capital for a while. While he's there, the cow dies and now the villagers are afraid of his possible reaction to it when he returns.

Turtles can fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iran border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall.

During the summer of 1968, Leon, a 10-year-old boy, navigates the hardships of young love, his lunatic mother's whims, and his urges to vandalize the house of his neighbors.

Cleavers are an all-American family living in Ohio - wise father Ward, loving mother June, teen-age son Wally and 8-year-old "Beaver" Theodore. Beaver hopes to get a bike as a gift from his father and to please him tries out for his school football team and he makes it, only to be embarrassed. The bike he gets is quickly stolen. Meanwhile Wally is trying to help his friend Eddie Haskell to get the heart of pretty classmate Karen, but Karen seems to like Wally more, and that leads to tensions between the friends.

Jo is a neglected 16-year-old girl whose promiscuous mother marries a dandy. Jo gets pregnant after a tryst with a black cook, who leaves her over his impending responsibilities of fatherhood, and she only finds support in a gay male friend.

Manny, Joel and Jonah tear their way through childhood and push against the volatile love of their parents. As Manny and Joel grow into versions of their father and Ma dreams of escape, Jonah, the youngest, embraces an imagined world all his own.

When her boyfriend is arrested for marijuana possession, Joleen Reedy and her 11-year-old daughter, Tara, take refuge with Joleen's aimless brother, James. Joleen soon runs off with a truck driver, and James is unable to meet his responsibilities. After Child Protective Services takes possession of Tara, James abducts her from a foster home, and the two travel from California to Utah, where his abusive father lives.

A wealthy Iranian family struggles to contain a teenager's growing sexual rebellion and her brother's newfound conservatism.

Sara is the perfect young housewife. When husband Hessam requires an expensive emergency operation abroad, it is she who works for the funds. For the next three years she labors secretly to pay the shady loan shark and save Hessam - until the truth is revealed and with it, the reality of her marriage.

In post-Taliban Kabul, two lost children, brother and sister whose parents are in prison, try to survive every day by scavenging for food. At night, they join their imprisoned mother.

After their father dies, a family of five are forced to survive on their own in a Kurdish village on the border of Iran and Iraq. Matters are made worse when 12 year old Ayoub, the new head of the family, is told that his handicapped brother, Madi, needs an immediate operation in order to remain alive. This heartbreaking tale shows the lengths to which a family will go in order to survive in the harshest of conditions, where even the horses are fed liquor in order to work.

Two children deal with the arrival of a foster brother, a Cambodian refugee. All three of them discover a hermetic retired railway engineer living in the woods. Then the children find an abandoned locomotive and, with the help of the engineer, bring it back to working order.

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.

Several people try to take advantage of a little girl's innocence to hustle money her mom gave to her to buy a goldfish with.

If you ever find yourself traveling down Interstate 49 through Missouri, try not to blink—you may miss Rich Hill, population 1,396. Rich Hill is easy to overlook, but its inhabitants are as woven into the fabric of America as those living in any small town in the country. This movie intimately chronicles the turbulent lives of three boys living in said Midwestern town and the fragile family bonds that sustain them.

The wife of Nasim, an Afghan immigrant in Iran, is gravely ill. He needs money to pay for her care, but his day labor digging wells does not pay enough. A friend connects Nasim to a two-bit promoter who sells tickets to watch Nasim ride a bicycle continuously for a week. The promoter brings in sick and aged spectators, haranguing them to find hope in Nasim's strength. Aided by his son, who feeds him as he rides, Nasim grinds out the days and shivering nights. Local officials believe this may be a plot and Nasim may be a spy; they try to sabotage him as do those who bet he won't finish the week. Will desperation alone get Nasim the money? Is any triumph an illusion?

This film, based on a well-known novel of the same name by Sadegh Chooback, is about a wronged man seeking revenge. Director Amir Naderi's inspiration for making the film was one of his childhood heroes, the legendary Zar Mohammad, who waged a one-man war against four swindlers and provoked wide spread popular sentiment against tyranny.

The story is about the world of a small family with familiar dreams and not so remarkable problems. The mother is trying to lead everything to save her family, but small events disarrange all her plans.

When a young girl's mother doesn't meet her after school, she tries to navigate the streets of Tehran by herself.

The movie consists of three episodes that explore the lives of poor and desperate in Iran. In episode one, a very poor couple with many crippled children abandon their newly born baby in hopes that it will have a better future. In the second episode, a mentally impaired and isolated young man tries to take care of his senile mother who is almost dead. In the third episode, a cowardly and desperate peddler tries to escape from his boss.

An 8 year old boy must return his friend's notebook he took by mistake, lest his friend be punished by expulsion from school.

Captain Khorshid is a sailor who although only having one hand, manages to sail his little boat. In his village, due to its hot climate and hard living conditions, dangerous criminals are sent into exile. They want to escape from the area, so they ask a middleman to strike a deal with Khorshid. Khorshid is asked to illegally take them out of the country with his boat. At first he is reluctant, but because of the hardships of living he accepts the job.

Maryam, her friend Parvaneh who is a nurse and her cousin Morteza go on a leisure trip to the north of the country. In the hotel where they are staying, Parvaneh meets a rich young man named Bahman who has come to the north with his uncle and his cousin Sharareh.

A mother of a poor family, has guests coming over, yet doesn't know how to get the dinner party altogether with limited resources.

Akbar, 18, has been held in a rehabilitation centre for committing murder at the age of sixteen. Now, Akbar is transferred to prison to await the day of his execution. A’la, a friend of Akbar, tries desperately to gain the consent of Akbar’s plaintiff so as to stop the execution.

A hundred and fourteen famous Iranian theater and cinema actresses and a French star: mute spectators at a theatrical representation of Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian poem from the twelfth century, put on stage by Kiarostami. The development of the text -- long a favorite in Persia and the Middle East -- remains invisible to the viewer of the film, the whole story is told by the faces of the women watching the show.

The hard daily life of a kid working in a photo shop while trying to get closer to the girl he likes.

After her divorce Mina is in need to financial and emotional supporting. She meets a guy and thinks that this is the man of her dreams. But things are not just as their first seem to be.

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.

Tuba works daily at a grueling textile factory in Iran, returning home every night to deal with the rest of her problematic family, which includes: a pregnant daughter whose husband beats her regularly; a teenage son, who's been getting into trouble due to his burgeoning career in radical politics; and an older son who goes to great lengths--such as attempting to sell the family's meager house--in order to get an engineering job in Japan as a means of getting out of Iran.