Best movies like Under the Stars of Paris

In the midst of his crumbling relationship, a radio show host begins speaking to his biggest fan—a young boy—via the telephone. But when questions about the boy's identity come up, the host's life is thrown into chaos.

With a father suffering from neurodegenerative disease, a young woman lives with her eight-year-old daughter. While struggling to secure a decent nursing home, she runs into an unavailable friend with whom she embarks on an affair.

Abla runs a modest local bakery from her home in Casablanca where she lives alone with her 8-year-old daughter Warda. Their routine of housework and homework is interrupted one day by a knock on the door. It is Samia, a young woman looking for a job and a roof over her head. The little girl is immediately taken with the newcomer, but her mother initially refuses to allow a pregnant stranger into their home. Gradually, however, Abla's resolve softens and Samia's arrival begins to offer all of them the prospect of a new life.

Paris by night. Alex, 22, wants to become a filmmaker. He is fascinated by first times and his girlfriend, Florence, has just left him for his best friend, Thomas. First break-up, first attempted murder: Alex tries to strangle Thomas, but gives up and wanders the streets. That evening, Mireille, a girl from provincial France who has come up to Paris to make commercials, is left by her boyfriend. Alex witnesses this separation. These two tormented souls run into each other at a party.

After a chaotic night of rioting in a marginal suburb of Paris, three young friends, Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, wander around unoccupied waiting for news about the state of health of a mutual friend who has been seriously injured when confronting the police.

Three people who have lost everything, a soldier tired of fighting, a young woman and a little girl, pose as a family to escape the civil war in Sri Lanka. They emigrate to France and settle in a chaotic neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris, where apparently the law no longer exists; but they, who barely know each other, struggle to survive there, even when the ghosts of war begin to haunt them again.

An ailing Greek man attempts to take a young, illegal Albanian immigrant home.

Leon arrives in Eva's life one morning, on the terrace of a café. The little boy settles down, asks for hot chocolate. The young woman, 35, without children, takes her home, calls social services and learns that Leon has run away from home. Eva has to bring him back but eventually delays the deadline. She who leads an idle existence, sheltered from need, attaches herself to the little boy. Called to order by the authorities, she ignores and tells Leon that they are now on the run. Together, they go to Italy in search of the mother of the little boy ...

Ray Eddy, an upstate New York trailer mom, is lured into the world of illegal immigrant smuggling. Broke after her husband takes off with the down payment for their new doublewide, Ray reluctantly teams up with Lila, a smuggler, and the two begin making runs across the frozen St. Lawrence River carrying illegal Chinese and Pakistani immigrants in the trunk of Ray's Dodge Spirit.

A young woman joins a theatrical troupe where she slowly believes that the director is involved with a secret group and that he is in grave danger.

Hector has been living on the motorways for years. His once comfortable family life has been replaced by a never-ending tour of service stations that offer him shelter, anonymity, washing facilities and food. The story follows his journey south from Scotland on his annual pilgrimage to a temporary Christmas shelter in London where he finds comfort, friendship and warmth. Over the course of his Homeric journey, Hector decides to reconnect with his long estranged past. As his previous life catches up with him, the story of how he came to be leading a marginal life begins to emerge.

Here we find a group of misfits who've given up on humanity and have decided to dwell below the pavement. The group has its own hierarchy, of course, and soon the conditions that drove them underground begin to manifest themselves without the influences of the Outside World.

Torn straight from the headlines, Michael Winterbottom's compelling and prescient 'In This World' follows young Afghan Jamal and his older cousin Enayat as they embark on a hazardous overland trip from their refugee camp at Peshawar, north-west Pakistan. Entering Turkey on foot through a snowy, Kurdish-controlled pass, the pair again take their lives into their hands and face suffocation when they are locked in a freight container on a ship bound for Italy. From there they plan to travel on to Paris, the Sangatte refuge centre and ultimately asylum in London.

Every year, thousands of Antarctica's emperor penguins make an astonishing journey to breed their young. They walk, marching day and night in single file 70 miles into the darkest, driest and coldest continent on Earth. This amazing, true-life tale is touched with humour and alive with thrills. Breathtaking photography captures the transcendent beauty and staggering drama of devoted parent penguins who, in the fierce polar winter, take turns guarding their egg and trekking to the ocean in search of food. Predators hunt them, storms lash them. But the safety of their adorable chicks makes it all worthwhile. So follow the leader... to adventure!!

One night in the New Orleans slums, vicious hoodlum Blackie and his friends kill an illegal immigrant who won too much in a card game. The next morning, Dr. Clint Reed of the Public Health Service confirms the dead man had pneumonic plague. To prevent a catastrophic epidemic, Clint must find and inoculate the killers and their associates, with the reluctant aid of police captain Tom Warren, despite official skepticism, and in total secrecy, lest panic empties the city. Can a doctor turn detective? He has 48 hours to try.

Like a Candide dreaming of Eldorado, Jallel lands in France, hoping to try his luck. From encounter to encounter, hostel to social welfare group, Jallel will make his way through a Paris of outcasts. Although failing to achieve his hopes, he discovers and shares in the solidarity felt by the destitute. –uniFrance

Reunited after a 17-year separation, Walter, an Angolan immigrant, is joined in the U.S. by his wife and teenage daughter. Now absolute strangers sharing a one-bedroom apartment, they discover a shared love of dance that may help overcome the emotional distance between them.

They come from all over Eastern Europe: Russia, Romania, Chechnya. They are Eastern boys. The oldest appear no more than 25; as for the youngest, there is no way of telling their age. They hang around the Gare du Nord train station in Paris. They might be prostitutes, but there is no way of knowing for certain. Muller, a discreet man in his late fifties has his eye on one of them - Marek. One afternoon, Muller gathers his courage and speaks to him. The young man agrees to come visit Muller the following day, at his place. However the next day, when the doorbell rings, Muller doesn't have the faintest idea that he has fallen into a trap.

Three officers are tasked with escorting an illegal immigrant to Charles de Gaulle airport, where he will be forced onto a plane and sent back to his homeland. But when they find out about the truth, they have to make a difficult choice.

What is beautiful about adolescence is that it is a time when everything is still possible. The four main characters are each conditioned by their background and environment, but they refuse to accept any predestination and to fight it. Expelled from schools, spurned by lovers, confined by identity these youngsters just keep on running, frustrated and in flames. Lonely hearts, intoxicated by music and alcohol, by the heat of minds and bodies, burn to ashes.

A Sicilian family deals with the arrival of a group of immigrants on their island.

A comedy about an absent-minded man who works at a advertising company and topples from one problem to another.

Tania, a young Russian woman who lives illegally in Belgium with her 13-year-old son Ivan. Constantly on her guard, she dreads police checks until the day she is arrested.

Fed up with the hectic, senseless world he lives in, Teddy decides to settle down alone in Siberia, in the midst of winter, in a hut by the shore of Lake Baikal. After an initial period of elation in front of the splendor and magic of unspoiled nature, Teddy soon finds himself confronted with the less glossy side of things : solitude, extreme cold, the necessity to find food, danger... One night Teddy gets lost in a blizzard and would be doomed to a certain death, were it not for Aleksei, a Russian convict living hidden away in the forest nearby, who rescues him in extremis. Friendship soon blossoms between the two men...

A homeless woman living in the tunnels below New York City survives on her own terms in the days leading up to a blizzard.

Compulsive spenders Albert and Bruno are in debt up to their necks. While seeking help from community workers to get their lives back on track, they run into a group of young green activists. Lured by the free beer and snacks rather than by the ideals of eco-activists, Albert and Bruno find themselves joining the movement without much conviction.

Broke, with nothing but her cat to her name and doors closing in her face, Paula is back in Paris after a long absence. As she meets different people along the way, there is one thing she knows for sure: she's determined to make a new start and she'll do it with style and panache.

Two friends, one a musician the other constantly depressed wander around Greece and France till they get to Paris without a penny to their name. Here they spend nights in the underground, and squat in houses with the African immigrants. One day they both fall in love with Mathilde a blond dancer and follow her to New York.

Ademoka is a headstrong and gifted 15-year-old girl whose big dream is to study. Her status as Lyuli an illegal immigrant from Tajikistan is a serious obstacle to this. She is exploited by her extended family and forced to beg on the streets, she manages to free herself from the family, when they get deported she has to choose between family and education. She gets helped on the way by some oddball characters, who come to her aid against the corrupt system and the patriarchal family.

After a painful journey through Europe, Alex, the Belarusian, joins the Foreign Legion in France and clings to a confused hope of a European identity. Jomo, the Nigerian, fights for the survival and durability of his people in the Niger Delta and is ready to die to defend his ideas. These two young people who are sacrificed and smashed together will, against all odds, meet and their destinies will merge to continue across borders, bodies, life and death...

A French woman falls in love with a Yugoslavian man, not realizing that he is an illegal immigrant.

Antonio (Jahmar Hill) is awakened from a coma; he was in for a year and a half after being shot by his father while trying to break up a domestic dispute between him and his mother. When Antonio wakes up he learns that his father who then committed suicide by shooting himself murdered his mother. With nowhere to go or a place to call home, Antonio turns to the cold streets of New York to find refuge and shelter. Antonio becomes the night shining armor to a stranger, Vanessa (Toni Belafonte) when he steps in to defend her from her abusive boyfriend, Streetz

Fabienne is a police officer. She does her job well but is gradually growing tired of the dehumanized nature of her work : arresting undocumented aliens day after day does not fit in with her ideals. That's why when, one night, Olga, the Kazakh prostitute she apprehends, begs her to free her not to leave her four-year-old son alone, she hesitates... And why, after Olga has run away and is found dead, Fabienne decides to deal with this matter personally...

A tale of cat and mouse that acks a punch through the very heart of the European Criminal underworld. From the dark sophisticated alleys of Paris to the depressing Birmingham ghetto, Chin Shui plays it hard and heavy to survive the savage streets.