Best movies like A Spring for the Thirsty
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
A parable centering on an old man who lives a secluded life in the desert, alone with only his memories and photographs. His wellspring, once a source of joy and hope for thirsty passersby, is now rarely used. No longer able to find comfort in his memories, he turns all his photographs to face the walls.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 409
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 70 min
Plot tags: psychedelic, spiritual
Best tv shows and movies like A Spring for the Thirsty (1965):
Similar in 83%
The Useless Girl (1982)
Plot Summary:
A teenage girl considered by everybody as "difficult" is sent to the village to live with her grandfather.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 76
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 94 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 82%
The Eve of Ivan Kupalo (1968)
Plot Summary:
Based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Eve of Ivan Kupala” (“St John’s Eve”).
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 443
Genere: Drama, Fantasy, Mystery
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 71 min
Plot tags: psychedelic, spiritual, surreal, mystical, beautiful, iconic
Similar in 83%
Siembra (2015)
Plot Summary:
A man and his son move from the Pacific coast of Colombia to Cali, but have a difficult time adapting to the city. When his son is killed, the father must go through the hard process of grief while trying to find roots in a place that does not belong to him.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 135
Genere: Drama
Country: Colombia, Germany
Duration: 80 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 82%
Yanco (1961)
Plot Summary:
The engaging and sentimental tale begins when the little boy (Ricardo Ancona) starts manifesting a greater and greater talent at music and at the same time, a supersensitivity to sounds. His overly astute hearing drives him into the woods and away from the cacophony of the town's hustle and bustle. Once in the woods, he meets a kindly old hermit who teaches him how to play the violin he made. After the old man dies, the violin ends up at a pawn shop, and each night the boy sneaks in to play it in secret. It is this haunting, nightly music that sets the town on edge -- people think an evil spirit is on the loose.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 180
Genere: Drama
Country: Mexico
Duration: 85 min
Plot tags: spiritual, minimal cast
Similar in 87%
Pastorale (1975)
Plot Summary:
In the mountain village comes a group of young musicians in Tbilisi. Here they are going to relax and rehearse. Sad story about the final rupture occurred, the peasants do not sing beautiful old songs, the musicians play music incomprehensible to them ... Far from the idyllic image of rural life.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 543
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags: spiritual
Similar in 78%
The Entreaty (1967)
Plot Summary:
Based on the poems “Aluda Ketelauri” and “The Guest and the Host” by the classic of Georgian literature Vazha Pshavela This film opens Tengiz Abuladze’s trilogy (“The Plea”, “The Wishing Tree”, “Repentance”), which discusses the subject of common human values using original national material. The death of heroes, the knights of truth and good, leads the Poet to the conclusion that the evil is invincible. Exhausted by struggle and privations, the Poet lays down his arms. He is visited then by all of his favorite heroes. They put out candles by dipping them into a beer cup – a ritual Khevsuri gesture meaning renunciation. And only after seeing what misfortune and harm the rejection of fighting the evil results in, the Poet takes up arms again.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 869
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 77 min
Plot tags: spiritual, crying, avant garde
Similar in 77%
The Legend of Suram Fortress (1985)
Plot Summary:
A film version of a well-known Georgian folk-tale. A young boy has to be immured into the walls of a fortress in order to stop it from crumbling to pieces.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 88 min
Plot tags: art house, spiritual, surreal, contemplative, poetic, serious, stylized, gloomy, folk tale, weird
Similar in 80%
Farewell (1983)
Plot Summary:
Matyora is a small village on a beautiful island with the same name. The existence of the village is threatened with flooding by the construction of a dam. This is the story of the inhabitants of Matyora and their farewell to their homeland.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 743
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 121 min
Plot tags: spiritual
Similar in 89%
Wings (1966)
Plot Summary:
Maya Bulgakova gives a marvelous performance as a once heroic Russian fighter pilot now living a quiet, disappointingly ordinary life as a school principal.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 85 min
Plot tags: spiritual, art house, heartfelt, psychological, touching, serious, realistic, contemplative
Similar in 76%
Uncle Vanya (1970)
Plot Summary:
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Uncle Vanya surely has the greatest claim as the best screen adaptation of a Chekhov play. Featuring brooding and articulate performances, especially from Sergei Bondarchuk as Doctor Astrov and gorgeous cinematography that shifts from sepia to autumnal colours, the film has an elegaic and bittersweet atmosphere. The setting is a crumbling country estate which supports the chic urban lifestyle of the elderly Professor Serebryakov who visits with his young and glamorous new wife, Elena.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 799
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: spiritual, art house, tension, suspense
Similar in 90%
Ashik Kerib (1988)
Plot Summary:
Wandering minstrel Ashik Kerib falls in love with a rich merchant's daughter, but is spurned by her father and forced to roam the world for a thousand and one nights - but not before he's got the daughter to promise not to marry till his return. It's told in typical Paradjanov style, in a series of visually ravishing 'tableaux vivants' overlaid with Turkish and Azerbaijani folksongs.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 73 min
Plot tags: spiritual, art house, surreal, fairy tale, atmospheric, serious, captivating, realistic, stylized, allegory
Similar in 90%
Ataka (1986)
Plot Summary:
Young lieutenant arrives to tank regiment stationed in the Central Asia. He uses unusual for Soviet Army methods to train his soldiers. It predictably leads to tensions with superiors and subordinates. However later it pays back during live exercises.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 27
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 89 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
100 Days Before the Command (1991)
Plot Summary:
Visually astonishing, erotically charged and emotionally jarring. '100 Days Before the Command' is Hussein Erkenov's courageous and stinging indictment of communism. Five young Red Army recruits struggle for survival against the merciless violence that surrounds them on a daily basis. Their only means of saving their dignity is by preserving the humanity and compassion they share for each other.
IMDB Rating: 5.3
IMDB Votes: 465
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 71 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 83%
Whispering Pages (1994)
Plot Summary:
The pages that whisper through this brooding, beautiful tone poem are from nineteenth-century Russian literature, primarily Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of “the degraded and the humiliated,” including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat. Shot partly in Sokurov’s dreamlike black and white with a dense sound track of eerie, echoing voices and bursts of mournful Mahler.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 630
Genere: Drama
Country: Russia, Germany
Duration: 77 min
Plot tags: spiritual, contemplative, existential, poetic, avant garde
Similar in 79%
The Horse Thief (1986)
Plot Summary:
Devout Buddhists, Norbu and Dolma live with their young son Tashi in a clan in Tibet. Norbu is a highwayman. After Norbu is charged with stealing from the temple, he and his family are banished. Impoverished and marginalized, they can do little when their beloved son becomes ill. Tashi dies of a fever. After a second son is born, Norbu focuses his every action on keeping this child alive, seeking re-admission to the clan for his wife and child, then risking all to save them from isolation and starvation in winter. Images of harsh landscapes, vultures, and prayer wheels carry a virtually wordless narrative.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: China
Duration: 88 min
Plot tags: spiritual, poetic
Similar in 82%
The White Bird Marked with Black (1971)
Plot Summary:
Colourful 'optimistic tragedy' of a poor family in Ukraine, living in the Carpathian mountains near the Romanian border, during the Second World War. This epic, which won the grand prize at the Moscow Film Festival in 1971, chronicles a family's struggle for survival in an area that was claimed as part of Rumania, Poland and the Ukraine, all within a short span of time. The family is very poor, and has a great many children. When World War II comes, various family members choose different masters; some even choose to work for the Soviets. War, struggle, marriages, births, deaths--all these events punctuate the story of this large family. Belaya Ptitsa s Chernoi Otmetinoi, or Bily Ptakh Z Chornoyu Oznakoyu was filmed in the Ukrainian language and was directed by the famed Ukrainian cinematographer, Yuri Ilyenko. It is notable for the way its rich, poetic imagery splashes across the screen, and is considered to be an important part of Ukrainian film heritage.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 572
Genere: Drama, War
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 99 min
Plot tags: psychedelic
Similar in 81%
Repentance (1984)
Plot Summary:
The day after the funeral of Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a small Georgian town, his corpse turns up in his son's garden. Although it is secretly reburied, the corpse keeps returning until the police capture the local woman who is responsible. This woman says that Varlam should never be laid to rest since his Stalin-like reign of terror led to the disappearance of her family and friends.
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 5000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 153 min
Plot tags: christian film, parody, captivating, manga, independent film, art film, dark comedy, thought provoking, bleak, serious
Similar in 84%
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965)
Plot Summary:
In a Carpathian village, Ivan falls in love with Marichka, the daughter of his father's killer. When tragedy befalls her, his grief lasts months; finally he rejoins the colorful life around him, marrying Palagna. She wants children but his mind stays on his lost love. To recapture his attention, Palagna tries sorcery, and in the process comes under the spell of the sorcerer, publicly humiliating Ivan, who then fights the sorcerer. The lively rhythms of village life, the work and the holidays, the pageant and revelry of weddings and funerals, the change of seasons, and nature's beauty give proportion to Ivan's tragedy.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 8000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 97 min
Plot tags: atmospheric, emotional, realistic, stylized, psychedelic, contemplative, surreal, scenic, art house, poetic
Similar in 77%
The Green Room (1978)
Plot Summary:
Based on the Henry James short story "The Altar of the Dead", in which a man becomes obsessed with the many dead people in his life and builds a memorial to honor them. This film is also based on other short story by Henry James, "The Beast of the Jungle". It would be the last film Truffaut would act in.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 94 min
Plot tags: spiritual, psychological, atmospheric, serious, emotional, realistic, contemplative, gloomy, cult film
Similar in 80%
The Devil, Probably (1977)
Plot Summary:
In order to be technically free of the mortal sin of suicide, a young man who has given up on the world pays a drug-addict to shoot him. Charles (Antoine Monnier), who is a student, has tried political action and investigated the claims of religion but ultimately finds nothing which will change the overwhelming bleakness he feels surrounded by. In this austere movie by director Robert Bresson, the power of the storytelling comes from the lucidity of the imagery captured on film, rather than in the acting.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 5000
Genere: Drama
Country: France
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags: spiritual, slow cinema, light, bleak, artsy, anthology, art house, existential, aesthetic, realistic
Similar in 87%
King Lear (1970)
Plot Summary:
King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 140 min
Plot tags: spiritual, bleak, serious, emotional, realistic, contemplative
Similar in 88%
My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985)
Plot Summary:
Russian provincial town in the middle of the 1930s Stalin's Great Purge. Ivan Lapshin, the head of the local police, does what he has to do. And he does it well.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags: slow cinema, spiritual, aesthetic
Similar in 89%
The Lonely Voice of Man (1987)
Plot Summary:
The film is Sokurov's feature film debut and is based on the novel The River Potudan by Andrei Platonov. It's a story about the lives of people in the Russian countryside in the beginning of the 20th century. The film was completed in 1979 as a graduation film, but was banned by the Soviet state and didn't premiere until 1987.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 716
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 87 min
Plot tags: poetic, spiritual, contemplative, avant garde
Similar in 87%
The Second Circle (1990)
Plot Summary:
A man tries to come to terms with his father's death and to deal with the mundane details of his burial in a society cut off from spirituality.
IMDB Rating: 7.1
IMDB Votes: 767
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags: spiritual, avant garde
Similar in 90%
The Asthenic Syndrome (1989)
Plot Summary:
In the old days it was called hypochrondria, or black melancholia. Now, apparently, it's termed the Asthenic Syndrome. Whatever it is, Nikolai, a teacher of epicly indifferent pupils, has got it, and it's not much fun.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 153 min
Plot tags: spiritual
Similar in 87%
Nine Days of One Year (1962)
Plot Summary:
Two young scientists are exploring new fields of nuclear physics. Dmitry Gusev and Ilya Kulikov are good friends, but rivals in love. Dmitry marries Lyolya and they live happily together. Luck has it that he makes an important discovery. Unfortunately he exposes himself to radioactivity during the experiments. As a result he falls seriously ill. However Dmitry has a strong spirit. His will to live, the deep passion for his work and his strong love for mankind makes it possible for him to recover.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 111 min
Plot tags: spiritual
Similar in 88%
The Passion of Anna (1969)
Plot Summary:
Andreas, a man struggling with the recent demise of his marriage and his own emotional isolation, befriends a married couple also in the midst of psychological turmoil. In turn he meets Anna, who is grieving the recent deaths of her husband and son. She appears zealous in her faith and steadfast in her search for truth, but gradually her delusions surface. Andreas and Anna pursue a love affair, but he is unable to overcome his feelings of deep humiliation and remains disconnected. Meanwhile, the island community is victimized by an unknown person committing acts of animal cruelty.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 10000
Genere: Drama
Country: Sweden
Duration: 101 min
Plot tags: art house, surreal, cerebral, psychological, bleak, spiritual, philosophical, mind bending, psychedelic, postmodern
Similar in 78%
An Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano (1977)
Plot Summary:
At the dilapidated country estate of Anna Petrovna Voinitseva, a group of feckless Russian aristocrats whiles away a summer afternoon. Unbeknownst to their respective spouses, local schoolteacher Platonov and the wife of Anna's stepson, Sophia, are former lovers whose meeting revives both passion and regret. Thrilled to see each other, they are nevertheless haunted by the loss of their youthful ideals.
IMDB Rating: 7.7
IMDB Votes: 4000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 103 min
Plot tags: atmospheric, spiritual, psychological, thought provoking, serious, realistic, contemplative, talky
Similar in 79%
The Steamroller and the Violin (1961)
Plot Summary:
Seven year old Sasha practices violin every day to satisfy the ambition of his parents. Already withdrawn as a result of his routines, Sasha quickly regains confidence when he accidentally meets and befriends worker Sergei, who works on a steamroller in their upscale Moscow neighborhood.
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 7000
Genere: Drama
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 46 min
Plot tags: art house, serious, realistic, spiritual, uplifting, touching, feel good, stylized, slow cinema, weird
Similar in 78%
Manchester by the Sea (2016)
Plot Summary:
After his older brother passes away, Lee Chandler is forced to return home to care for his 16-year-old nephew. There he is compelled to deal with a tragic past that separated him from his family and the community where he was born and raised.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 305000
Genere: Drama
Country: USA
Duration: 137 min
Plot tags: sad, depressing, heartbreaking, psychological, emotional, touching, independent film, compassionate, realistic, cerebral