Best movies like Downstream from the Sun
Last updated March 2024
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Plot Summary:
Young teacher first experience in their profession acquired in a remote mountain village, which has no school building. Life of a farmer, a clash between two warring race, then the conflict between the government and farmers for cutting the national forests needed to build new schools and the presence of a young teacher who doubt the search for truth, that will lead to major conflicts and tragedies.
IMDB Rating: 7.5
IMDB Votes: 67
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags: black and white, crying, learning
Best tv shows and movies like Downstream from the Sun (1969):
Similar in 84%
Selam (2013)
Plot Summary:
'Selam' is a Turkish movie that tells the impressive stories of three Turkish teachers who are idealists working at schools opened by Turkish entrepreneurs on three different continents and in three different countries: Afghanistan, Senegal, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. This story is based on true events that has been in progress for more than 20 years in which a number of young people in love of peace and humanity leave their countries to teach, help and live in countries they have never heard of before. This is the story of people who live for their ideals and other people before themselves, and who leave their families, loves, friends, countries behind. They set on this pet just with the inspiration of the words which said "A couple of eyes are waiting for you here, but thousands of eyes are waiting in faraway lands." They had sacrifice and kindness in their bags, love in their hearts and a smiling Selam (greetings) in their tongues. - Written by Akif Okumus.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 3000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Turkey
Duration: 104 min
Plot tags: educational
Similar in 86%
Mountain of Wrath (1968)
Plot Summary:
After the liberation in 1946, in a village in western Macedonia implemented collectivization farms. The President of the rural cooperative Stamat, former fighter, who with all their revolutionary zeal and enthusiasm believes collectivization only way for poor farmers. In doing so, he faces resistance from wealthy farmers who can hardly be separated from the property. In contrast, Stamat faced with the decision of the Committee, the mountain that provides a livelihood and that villagers consider her to be assigned to the Wood Industry. His attempt to change this decision, there is no success. He feels that his revolutionary ideal betrayed. In these circumstances Stamat faced with the fact that the villagers do not trust him, but nevertheless he stands on the right side.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 41
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 83 min
Plot tags: epic
Similar in 80%
Kick-Off (1990)
Plot Summary:
A group of students with varying family backgrounds begin to question their lives and the hypocritical values of their corrupt socialist society. Their decision to follow their own ideals brings them in disrepute with those closest to them. Their support of one another finally brings them to realise a friendship based on loyalty and belonging.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 129
Genere: Drama
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 89%
Days to Remember (1987)
Plot Summary:
In this melodramatic tale, the well-made plans of a career-obsessed woman are derailed when she sets her sights on a young man who is plainly not very interested in her. In the story, Katherina is an ambitious reporter for German television, and her Yugoslavian family background makes her a natural to cover stories in that country. While preparing a story on children with dual nationalities, she encounters Peter, a German lad who is researching his father's war record to see if he was guilty or innocent of war crimes. She brings Peter to see her family, and later her wooing efforts finally seem to bring her some promise of a relationship.
IMDB Rating: 4.9
IMDB Votes: 47
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: West Germany, Yugoslavia
Duration: 95 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 85%
The Outsiders (1986)
Plot Summary:
Based on the book written by author Pai Hsien-yung and first published in 1983 in Taiwan. A-Qing, a young student is discovered during sex by a night watchman, young A-Qing is beaten and expelled from home by his violent abusive father. In a public park in Taipei he is found by Yang (a middle-aged photographer), who introduces him to three other teenage boys--all abandoned by their families because they were gay. They form a kind of surrogate family. When A-Qing meets Wang Kei-Lung, he falls madly in love.
IMDB Rating: 7.0
IMDB Votes: 76
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Taiwan
Duration: 102 min
Plot tags: queer cinema
Similar in 81%
Women in Prison (1985)
Plot Summary:
After graduation, a young woman gets his first job in the women's prison in the province. The story follows her struggle to survive in a small town with her small child, alcohol addiction, and the battle with the prisoners and prison brutality and other schemers who wanted to remove her from working spot.
IMDB Rating: 6.9
IMDB Votes: 80
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 106 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 87%
It Rains in My Village (1968)
Plot Summary:
A bizarre and tragic love story involving swineherd, village fool, teacher and an agricultural pilot. The story unfolds in a remote village in the communist ruled Yugoslavia at the down of Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
IMDB Rating: 7.2
IMDB Votes: 671
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Yugoslavia, France
Duration: 84 min
Plot tags: black and white, serious, realistic
Similar in 82%
The Pals (1979)
Plot Summary:
The war is over, and a group of young Partisans returns to their town to continue their interrupted education. They are doing everything in their way, because they are young enough to go to school and to horse around, but mature enough to react to lies and injustice. Loud, ready to fight, they are a problem in school, in youth organization, in town's command. And when they get used to normal life, one of them gets killed by Chetnik renegades' ambush. The comrades wear their uniforms again, take their weapons and succeed in revenging their comrade. When they return to school again, they are determined to pass the maturity test as well.
IMDB Rating: 6.0
IMDB Votes: 156
Genere: Drama, Romance, War
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 96 min
Plot tags: crying
Similar in 83%
A Day Longer Than a Year (1971)
Plot Summary:
The film tells of devastating earthquake in Banja Luka in 1969 and follows a group of prisoners in prison during devastating earthquake and people and residents of Banja Luka. Fate of prisoners,the fate of the city and residents of Banja Luka, are light motive of this movie.
IMDB Rating: 6.6
IMDB Votes: 27
Genere: Drama, History
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 82 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 83%
Sunday Lunch (1982)
Plot Summary:
A surgeon torn between his family and mistress sees his upcoming promotion as a salvation from midlife crisis.
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 141
Genere: Drama
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 88%
Morning Bells (1967)
Plot Summary:
Young Teacher Lado moves to the village, where he falls in love with Ketu,a young librarian, but Ketu has been engaged to a fellow villager since childhood. Chofe and his brother threaten Lado that breaking his word and breaking custom can be fatal for the lovers. However, young people are not afraid of threats.
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 10
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 75 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 79%
The Inmate (2007)
Plot Summary:
Set in two contrasting enivronments that undeline the same premise of imprisonment, Selda tells the story of Rommel (Sid Lucero), a young man who accidentally kills a boy, resulting in his incarceration. Inside the jail, he befriends another inmate, Esteban (Emilio), who becomes his rock and protector. Seven years later, Rommel is living in the province as a farmer together with Sita (Ara Mina) his wife. Esteban tracks down Rommel in hopes of renewing a brewing love affair. Rommel and Sita welcome Esteban into their lives, until their intimacy crosses borderlines and results in the undeniable scourge of self-discovery.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 207
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Philippines
Duration: 140 min
Plot tags: suspenseful, psychological, rough, suspense, crying, independent film, queer cinema
Similar in 90%
Hot Cat? (1968)
Plot Summary:
This love story finds a lonely teacher resisting the advances of an interested co-worker. She is fearful of affection and relationships due to a previous romance that did not work out. The small-town school marm tries to help a male student who has been suspended for drunkenness. She tutors the young man, and soon the two engage in a tender and passionate love affair in which both people reach out and touch each other physically and emotionally.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 173
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Finland
Duration: 78 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 90%
Massacre at Noon (1975)
Plot Summary:
In Autumn of 1941, the German army, determined to put down a Communist-led uprising in Serbia, is conducting a policy of killing 100 hostages for any German soldier killed. The city of Kraljevo is the site of one of those massacres, portrayed in this movie.
IMDB Rating: 5.6
IMDB Votes: 85
Genere: Drama, Romance, War
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 91 min
Plot tags: heroic, crying
Similar in 88%
Girl from the Mountains (1972)
Plot Summary:
The relationship between a boy and a girl shortly after the start of the war and the arrival of the Germans. He goes to Chetniks, and there he disappears without a trace, and she ,after much torture and solitude, begins to search for him not thinking in those moments of what the horrors of war can bring.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 36
Genere: Drama, Romance, War
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 82 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 81%
Sunstruck (1972)
Plot Summary:
Stanley Evans, a Welsh schoolteacher, decides to emigrate to Australia for a better life but ends up working in a school in the dead-end town of Kookaburra Springs. He forms a school choir and decides to compete in a singing competition in Sydney.
IMDB Rating: 5.9
IMDB Votes: 117
Genere: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Country: Australia, UK
Duration: 91 min
Plot tags: independent film
Similar in 85%
Nahid (2015)
Plot Summary:
A woman tries to mend the broken pieces of her last life, as she is now involved with a new sexual relationship with a man.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Iran
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: psychological, touching, contemplative, independent film
Similar in 87%
Evergreen Tree (1961)
Plot Summary:
Yeong-shin (played by the Choi Eun-hee–Shin Sang-ok’s wife) and Dong-hyeok (Shin Yeong-gyun) graduate from college with a cause. They plan to bring education and modernization to farmers living in the rural area of their birth. When they arrive, the pair immediately gets to work, Dong-hyeok builds a village hall and starts aiding the farmers while Yeong-shin tries to gather the children to form a school. However, the villagers at first resent and resist the pair. It is not until one child, Ok-bun, takes the inititive and and learns to read under Yeong-shin’s care that the villages trust the pair and allow their children to be taken from the fields and taught reading, writing and math.
IMDB Rating: 7.6
IMDB Votes: 29
Genere: Drama
Country: South Korea
Duration: 110 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 76%
Lone Wolf (1972)
Plot Summary:
A boy finds a large wolf-like dog in the mountain and they befriend. The local peasants think that it may be a real wolf responsible for the sheep pestilence. They decide to kill the animal, but the boy is worried about it and he secretly provides the dog with the food.
IMDB Rating: 7.9
IMDB Votes: 865
Genere: Adventure, Drama, Family
Country: Yugoslavia
Duration: 90 min
Plot tags:
Similar in 80%
Friends (1993)
Plot Summary:
Three female friends, in the end of the eighties, share a house in Johannesburg, South Africa. Each of them has her own way to live the apartheid. Thoko is a black teacher, she practices non-violent passive resistance. The afrikaner Aninka takes refuge in archaeology not to see the reality. Sophie is a white militant, putting bombs in public places... Each of them respect the other two's ideas, but one of Sophie's bombs will change everything.
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 134
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: UK, France, South Africa
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: crying, independent film
Similar in 81%
We'll Live Till Monday (1968)
Plot Summary:
Ilya Semenovich Melnikov is a history teacher in an ordinary Soviet high school. He is a very good teacher and his students and colleagues treat him with a great deal of respect. However, Melnikov faces a lot of difficulties in his work. In particular, everybody at school is spreading rumors about Natalya Sergeyevna, an Enlish language teacher and a former student of Melnikov, being in love with him. Exhausted by his mental suffering, Melnikov asks the principal to allow him to quit his job. At the end of the week that is to become the last week of Melnikov's teaching career the students of his class write an in-class essay on how they understand happiness. Svetlana Mikhailovna, their Russian teacher, is shocked by what one of the students wrote in her essay, nevertheless, she allows her to read it in front of the class. The other students express support of their classmate. Melnikov gets involved in the conflict, after which he reconsiders his decision to quit.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Soviet Union
Duration: 106 min
Plot tags: sentimental, touching, captivating, intellectual
Similar in 88%
Broken English (1996)
Plot Summary:
Ivan is the fierce patriarch of a family of Croatian refugees in Auckland. Nina is his daughter, ready to live on her own, despite his angry objections. Eddie is the Maori she takes as her lover. Nina works at a restaurant where Eddie cooks. For a price, she agrees to marry a Chinese, another restaurant employee, so that he (and his Chinese wife) can establish permanent residency. The money gives her the independence she needs to leave her parents' house and move in with Eddie. Complications arise when Eddie realizes the depth of her father's fury and the strength of Nina's family ties.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 734
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: New Zealand
Duration: 92 min
Plot tags: sexy, sentimental, serious, realistic, sexual, crying, independent film, erotic, romantic, road movie
Similar in 80%
Solomon & Gaenor (1999)
Plot Summary:
A young Jew in 1911 Wales tries to make his living by selling fabrics door to door, but to do so he must hide his nationality. On one of his sales he meets and falls in love with a demure young woman with a strong-willed father and a Jew-hating brother. The two fall in love and she becomes pregnant, but only then does she learn of his ethnic background. When anti-Jewish riots break out, the two are forced to flee and become separated.
IMDB Rating: 6.8
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: UK
Duration: 105 min
Plot tags: sad, independent film, historical drama, sentimental, sincere, touching, serious, emotional, realistic, period drama
Similar in 85%
Blackmail Boy (2003)
Plot Summary:
In the small, closed community of a provincial town, Magda tries to maintain a balance within a family facing many serious problems. The families apparently normal, bourgeois, every-day life will crack open, bringing to the surface hatred and passions of the kind that lie well-hidden in the mists of the nearby lake. An intense plot and a totally unexpected ending make up this film, which features characters who are vulnerable, innocent and ordinary, but who become ruthless and callous, worrying only about protecting their financial resources. The offences are disproportionately serious compared to the financial benefits they try to secure.
IMDB Rating: 5.7
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Greece
Duration: 100 min
Plot tags: serious, realistic, crying, humorous, sexual, sexy, queer cinema
Similar in 82%
Julie Walking Home (2002)
Plot Summary:
Julie's son is dying of cancer and her marriage falling apart. She goes to Poland in search of a man who can heal using his hands. Julie finds not only a magical cure for her son, but also comes across a love so pure it begins to heal the aching in her heart.
IMDB Rating: 6.3
IMDB Votes: 1000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Germany, Canada, Poland, USA
Duration: 118 min
Plot tags: psychological, emotional, realistic, atmospheric, serious, contemplative, erotic, spiritual, crying, allegory
Similar in 84%
Free Radicals (2003)
Plot Summary:
Following the death of Manu (Resetarits) in a car accident, the film relates the interwoven stories of several people who become indirectly connected by the events and aftermath of the crash.
IMDB Rating: 6.2
IMDB Votes: 553
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Austria, Germany, Switzerland
Duration: 120 min
Plot tags: sincere, serious, realistic, touching, contemplative, gloomy, crying
Similar in 84%
The Year My Voice Broke (1987)
Plot Summary:
Coming-of age feature, set in a New South Wales country town in the 1960s, about a 15 year-old boy. It follows his loves and how he copes with life's problems such as death and departure.
IMDB Rating: 7.3
IMDB Votes: 2000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Australia
Duration: 103 min
Plot tags: sad, independent film, retro, social, sex comedy, sentimental, sincere, touching, serious, realistic
Similar in 79%
The Green (2011)
Plot Summary:
Michael Gavin and his partner Daniel trade the rat race of New York City for the idyllic charm of the Connecticut shoreline, with hopes of a simpler life and time for Michael to finish his first novel. All that changes when one of Michael's high school students accuses him of 'inappropriate conduct', and the town rushes to judgment.
IMDB Rating: 6.4
IMDB Votes: 860
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: USA
Duration: 91 min
Plot tags: thought provoking, serious, realistic, touching, lgbt cinema, crying, detective
Similar in 90%
Yi Yi: A One and a Two... (2000)
Plot Summary:
Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries.
IMDB Rating: 8.1
IMDB Votes: 28000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: Taiwan, Japan
Duration: 173 min
Plot tags: touching, art house, philosophical, depressing, emotional, harsh, lyrical, sentimental, realistic, poignant
Similar in 88%
The Road Home (1999)
Plot Summary:
Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.
IMDB Rating: 7.8
IMDB Votes: 14000
Genere: Drama, Romance
Country: China
Duration: 89 min
Plot tags: emotional, romantic, road movie, sentimental, atmospheric, stylized, sad, psychedelic, feel good, epic