Best movies like White Material

Similar in 86%

Harrison's Flowers (2000)

Plot Summary:

Harrison Lloyd is a Pulitzer-winning photojournalist. His wife and family are making it hard for him to keep his mind on his work when he's in a war zone, and he wants to change jobs to something less stressful. But he's got one last assignment, in war-torn Yugoslavia, in 1991, at the height of the fighting. Word comes back that he apparently died in a building collapse, but his wife Sarah (also a journalist for Newsweek) refuses to believe that he's dead and goes looking for him. She's helped immensely by the photo-journalists Eric Kyle and Marc Stevenson that she runs into over there; together, they're determined to make it through the chaotic landscape to Vukovar, which is not only the nexus of the war but where she believes Harrison is located. Meanwhile, Harrison's son Cesar is looking after his father's prized greenhouse, keeping hope, and flowers, alive.

Similar in 86%

Ivan's Childhood (1962)

Plot Summary:

Poetic journey through the shards and shadows of one boy’s war-ravaged youth.

Similar in 90%

Stop-Loss (2008)

Plot Summary:

A veteran soldier returns from his completed tour of duty in Iraq, only to find his life turned upside down when he is arbitrarily ordered to return to field duty by the Army.

Similar in 89%

Cross of Iron (1977)

Plot Summary:

It is 1943, and the German army, ravaged and demoralised, are hastily retreating from the Russian front. In the midst of all this madness, conflict brews between the aristocratic yet ultimately pusillanimous Captain Stransky and the courageous Corporal Steiner. Stransky is the only man who believes that the Third Reich are still vastly superior to the Russian army; however within his pompous persona lies a quivering coward who longs for the Iron Cross so that he can return to Berlin a hero. Steiner, on the other hand is cynical, defiantly non-conformist and more concerned with the safety of his own men rather than the horde of military decorations offered to him by his superiors. Steiner's lack of respect results in a growing animosity between the two.

Similar in 88%

Time of the Wolf (2003)

Plot Summary:

When Anna and her family arrive at their holiday home, they find it occupied by strangers. This confrontation is just the beginning of a painful learning process.

Similar in 81%

To Live (1994)

Plot Summary:

Fugui and Jiazhen endure tumultuous events in China as their personal fortunes move from wealthy landownership to peasantry.

Similar in 75%

Turtles Can Fly (2004)

Plot Summary:

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.

Similar in 88%

Son of Saul (2015)

Plot Summary:

In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival trying to save from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son.

Similar in 76%

Shake Hands with the Devil (2007)

Plot Summary:

Canadian Lt. General Romeo Dallaire was the military commander of the UN mission in Rwanda and this movie is personal and, all too true, story of his time there during the genocide of 1994. It is not quite as moving as the earlier Hotel Rwanda and is less geared to drama and emotional manipulation, but it is still grim and upsetting.

Similar in 88%

Beasts of No Nation (2015)

Plot Summary:

A drama based on the experiences of Agu, a child soldier fighting in the civil war of an unnamed African country. Follows the journey of a young boy, Agu, who is forced to join a group of soldiers in a fictional West African country. While Agu 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 Depicts the mechanics of war and does not shy away from explicit, visceral detail, and paints a complex, difficult picture of Agu as a child soldier.

Similar in 88%

Shooting Dogs (2005)

Plot Summary:

Two westerners, a priest and a teacher find themselves in the middle of the Rwandan genocide and face a moral dilemna. Do they place themselves in danger and protect the refugees, or escape the country with their lives? Based on a true story.

Similar in 76%

In Darkness (2011)

Plot Summary:

A dramatization of one man's rescue of Jewish refugees in the Nazi-occupied Polish city of Lvov. In Darkness tells the true story of Leopold Soha who risks his own life to save a dozen people from certain death. Initially only interested in his own good, the thief and burglar hides Jewish refugees for 14 months in the sewers of the Nazi-occupied town of Lvov (former Poland).