Best movies like Turtles Can Fly

Beirut, 1982: a young Palestinian refugee and an Israeli fighter pilot form a tentative bond in their attempt to make their way across war-torn Lebanon back to their home.

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

Somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, Komona a 14-year-old girl tells her unborn child growing inside her the story of her life since she has been at war. Everything started when she was abducted by the rebel army at the age of 12.

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.

The story of the rape of Nanking, one of the most tragic events in history. In 1937, the invading Japanese army murdered over 200,000 and raped tens of thousands of Chinese. In the midst of this horror, a small group of Western expatriates banded together to save 250,000. Nanking shows the tremendous impact individuals can make on the course of history.

Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi, survived genocide and sexual slavery committed by ISIS. Repeating her story to politicians and media, this ordinary girl finds herself thrust onto the world stage as the voice of her people. Away from the podium, she must navigate bureaucracy, fame and people's good intentions.

Kurdish-Iranian poet Sahel has just been released from a thirty-year prison sentence in Iran. Now the one thing keeping him going is the thought of finding his wife, who thinks he's been dead for over twenty years.

A young orphan named Amiro lives alone in an abandoned tanker in the Iranian port city of Abadan. He survives by shining shoes, selling water, and collecting deposit bottles. Although he sometimes finds himself at odds with both adults and competing older kids, he finds solace in dreams about departing cargo ships and airplanes—and by running.

A cast of unknown performers are used in this drama about child soldiers fighting a war in an unnamed African country.

After an Afghanistan-born woman who lives in Canada receives a letter from her suicidal sister, she takes a perilous journey through Afghanistan to try to find her.

Based on the experiences of Agu, a child fighting in the civil war of an unnamed, fictional West African country. Follows Agu's journey as he's forced to join a group of soldiers. While he fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination.

Santiago, capital of Chile during the Marxist government of elected, highly controversial president Salvador Allende. Father McEnroe supports his leftist views by introducing a program at the prestigious "collegio" (Catholic prep school) St. Patrick to allow free admission of some proletarian kids. One of them is Pedro Machuca, slum-raised son of the cleaning lady in Gonzalo Infante's liberal-bourgeois home. Yet the new classmates become buddies, paradoxically protesting together as Gonzalo gets adopted by Pedro's slum family and gang. But the adults spoil that too, not in the least when general Pinochet's coup ousts Allende, and supporters such as McEnroe.

Follows a young cyclo (bicycle cab) driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy's struggles to scratch out a living for his two sisters and grandfather in the mean streets of the city lead to petty crime on behalf of a mysterious Madame from whom he rents his cyclo.

Chronicles of everyday life in Iraq before and after the U.S. invasion.

This documentary about teenagers living on the streets in Seattle began as a magazine article. The film follows nine teenagers who discuss how they live by panhandling, prostitution, and petty theft.

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.

Mamo, an old and legendary Kurdish musician living in Iran, plans to give one final concert in Iraqi Kurdistan. After seven months of trying to get a permit and rounding up his ten sons, he sets out for the long and troublesome journey in a derelict bus, denying a recurring vision of his own death at half moon. Halfway the party halts at a small village to pick up female singer Hesho, which will only add to the difficulty of the undertaking, as it is forbidden for Iranian women to sing in public, let alone in the company of men. But Mamo is determined to carry through, if not for the gullible antics of the bus driver.

A Turkish small time black marketeer wants to enter the cell phone business. To get enough money, he promises the local doctor to get medicine for sick children.

Two Iranian pilots are in a special mission to save the people of a Syrian city who are surrounded by the terrorists. But they have to face many challenges before manage to accomplish their mission.

Based on a true story dating back to 1985 when two Polish boys, a teenager and his little brother, escaped from communist Poland all the way to Sweden, hidden under a truck. In the movie, their destination has been changed to Denmark.

During the course of one summer, a young Irish lad named Chris befriends an American boy named Joe. The two couldn't be more different, yet they become inseparable. Things turn horribly wrong however, when Chris discovers his new best friend isn't a he, but a she. The sadness only begins as Chris learns why Joe's gender must be kept a secret.

An opus in three parts, Iraq In Fragments offers a series of intimate, passionately-felt portraits: A fatherless 11-year-old is apprenticed to the domineering owner of a Baghdad garage; Sadr followers in two Shiite cities rally for regional elections while enforcing Islamic law at the point of a gun; a family of Kurdish farmers welcomes the US presence, which has allowed them a measure of freedom previously denied. American director James Longley spent more than two years filming in Iraq to create this stunningly photographed, poetically rendered documentary of the war-torn country as seen through the eyes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offers to guide them, and takes as his wife Halaleh, the clan's lone woman, a widow with a young son. Reeboir attaches himself to a dozen pre-teen boys weighed down by contraband they carry across the border; they're mules, always on the move. Said and Reeboir try to teach as their potential students keep walking. Danger is close; armed soldiers patrol the skies, the roads, and the border. Is there a role for a teacher? Is there hope?

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

During the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, an assorted group of refugees, including an American soldier, an Army nurse, a priest and a group of local children, try to make their getaway aboard a rattletrap, creaky bus.

A recently orphaned young Kurdish-French woman travels to Iraqi Kurdistan to find her mother's village, likely destroyed during the Anfal genocide. On her journey she meets two American film students who are traveling to remote villages screening Charlie Chaplin films. They decide to help her search, an undertaking that brings them to the war-weary Mount Qandil, dubbed by the locals the Kurdish Bermuda Triangle, along the Iraqi-Turkish-Iranian borders.

As the Battle of the Bulge rages on, an American tank unit gets trapped behind Nazi lines. With just hours before the bombs of Operation Ardennes Fury fall, the tank's commander makes the risky decision to rescue an orphanage.

A priceless tablet of Gilgamesh, the oldest and most important work of literature is stolen from a museum. A security guard vows to do whatever it takes to get it back from a group of smugglers. Along the way, he faces his own inner demons.

The story of the pioneering project to rehabilitate child survivors of the Holocaust on the shores of Lake Windermere.

Qader, a bricklayer from Sardasht in Kurdistan Iran whose wife is pregnant with her 4th child, suddenly found himself amid a war crime perpetrated by the Saddam regime. On June 28th, 1987 Iraqi air fighters dropped mustard gas bombs on the city...

Gabriel, aged 10, lives in a comfortable ex-pat neighborhood in Burundi, his ‘small country’. Gabriel is a normal kid, happy, carefree and having adventures with his friends and little sister. Then in 1993, tensions in neighboring Rwanda spill over, threatening his family and his innocence.

During the war between Iran and Iraq, a group of Iranian Kurd musicians set off on an almost impossible mission. They will try to find Hanareh, a singer with a magic voice who crossed the border and may now be in danger in the Iraqi Kurdistan. As in his previous films, this Kurdish director is again focusing on the oppression of his people.

"Jiyan" takes place in Halabja about five years after Saddam's infamous chemical attack in 1988. Diyari (Kurdo Galali) has come from his new homeland, America, to put up a badly needed new orphanage. As construction proceeds, he gradually becomes acquainted with the tragic individual stories of the survivors. Prime among these is orphan girl Jiyan (Pirsheng Berzinji), and her lively young cousin Sherko (Choman Hawrami). Although he seems to fit right into life in this impoverished town, Diyari can hardly absorb the catastrophe that hit there, nor can he accept the level of injury that he encounters. When the orphanage is ready, Diyari says his goodbyes, plunging Jiyan back into quiet despair.

This is the story of two women on opposite ends of a lifetime, a very young, curious Jiyan and her life-weary but resistant grandmother Berfe, in order to save the person who links them to each other.

In the winter of 1988, in the depths of the Iraq/Iran war, the border town of Halabja was attacked by chemical weapons with all its people and their different stories.