20 best movies like Bo (2010)

The life of an illegal Russian boy who, after losing his family, is pushed into becoming an escort - ultimately trying to come to terms with who he thinks he is.

Ali, Kwita, Omar and Boubker are street kids. The daily dose of glue sniffing represents their only escape from reality. Since they left Dib and his gang, they have been living on the portside of Casablanca. They live in constant fear of Dib's revenge. Ali wants to become a sailor - when he was living with his mother, a prostitute, he used to listen to a fairy tale about the sailor who discovered the miracle island with two suns. Instead of finding his island in the dream, Ali and his friends are confronted with Dib's gang. Matters are getting serious.

Deaf mute Sergey enters a specialized boarding school for deaf-and-dumb. In this new place, he needs to find his way through the hierarchy of the school’s network dealing with crimes and prostitution, the Tribe. By taking part of several robberies, he gets propelled higher into the organization. Then he meets one of the Chief’s concubines Anya, and unwillingly breaks all the unwritten rules of the tribe.

Sylvia Barrett is a rookie teacher at New York's inner-city Calvin Coolidge High: her lit classes are overcrowded, a window is broken, there's no chalk, books arrive late. The administration is concerned mainly with forms and rules (there's an up and and a down staircase); bells ring at the wrong time. Nevertheless, she tries. How she handles the chaos and her despair in her first semester makes up the film: a promising student drops out, another sleeps through class, a girl with a crush on a male teacher gets suicidal, and a bright but troublesome student misunderstands Sylvia's reaching out. A discussion of Dickens, parents' night, and a mock trial highlight the term. Can she make it?

Bruno and Sonia, a young couple living off her benefit and the thefts committed by his gang, have a new source of money: their newborn son.

After running away from her abusive mother, a streetwise teen seeks refuge with her father, but he rejects her when he learns that she's pregnant.

Young and impulsive Rosetta lives with her alcoholic mother and, moved by despair, she will do anything to maintain a job.

This is a film about a troubled teen, Sean Randall, who is falsely accused of planning a Columbine shooting scenario. It all begins when an unlikely bond forms between Sean (Connor Jessup) and a preppy teenage girl named Deanna Roy (Alexia Fast). Deanna's boyfriend is deeply threatened by Sean and Deanna's friendship, resulting in a violent confrontation. Seeking to protect himself, Sean issues a death threat online - and is swiftly arrested. When the police raid Sean's home, they find rifles, shotguns, knives and ammunition - all property of Sean's father Ricky (Michael Buie), an avid hunter. They also find a supposed "hit list" with twenty names of people who have tormented Sean. The authorities and the media proclaim another Columbine has been narrowly averted, and soon Sean faces a terrifying imprisonment in a youth detention facility. Sean's only hope is to overcome his dark image, and prove his innocence to Deanna and to his community.

Strangers in their own birthplace, a camp 16-year-old, lollipop-sucking Dany and his 18-year-old brother Odysseus cross the entire country (along with pet rabbit Dido ) in search of their Greek father, who they only know as “The Nameless”, after the death of their Albanian mother. They hope to get Greek passports and citizenship but on the journey they encounter racism and prejudice.

A teenage girl, distraught from her vain attempt to connect with her estranged mother, resorts to cutting herself. When she develops an online relationship with an older woman, she learns to accept her sexuality and the endless solitude of sprawling suburbia.

Mo Ali’s futuristic knife-crime drama brings the dystopian environment of CHILDREN OF MEN and DISTRICT 13 to London’s East 17. SHANK delivers a ruthless vision of forthcoming urban life, where guns have been superseded by knives and are fiercely wielded by aimless youths. Amidst the chaos is the Paper Chazers gang, a rare morally conscious group who trade scavenged food for money. After Chazers gang member, Junior (Kedar Williams-Stirling), witnesses his brother, murder he must decide whether to get revenge of stick to the gangs moral code... In this superbly paced and artistic film, present-day social issues, and murky city streets, provide a perfect canvas for imagination and action.

An abused 15 year old is charged with a murder that carries the death penalty in this fact-based story.

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

Alejandro, a tough and ambitious Latino street orphan on the verge of adolescence, lives and works in an auto-body repair shop in a sprawling junkyard on the outskirts of Queens, New York. In this chaotic world of adults, young Alejandro struggles to make a better life for himself and his 16-year-old sister, Isamar.

Heli must try and protect his young family when his 12-year-old sister inadvertently involves them in the brutal drug world. He must battle against the drug cartel that have been angered as well as the corrupt police force.

Redheaded teen Remy is bullied by his soccer teammates and drawn into fights with his younger sister and mother in their cramped apartment. After a flare-up of domestic violence, he flees home and is tracked down by a bitter guidance counselor, Patrick, also a redhead. Patrick looks upon Remy’s sullen insolence with both sympathy and disdain and decides to toughen him up...

A thrilling and raw crime drama following a gang of drug dealers in Hackney, London - an honest and gripping rendition of inner-city drug and gang culture.

Romances end in blood and the frail hopes of individuals are torn apart in a vile karmic continuity of colonialism, civil war and occupation. After surviving Japanese colonization, Korea became the first war zone of the Cold War. The legacy of war remains today in this divided country. Three forlorn teenagers, Chank-guk, Jihum and Eunok are figures in the landscape of this story, which highlights the global implications of a very Korean reality. None of them is able to escape the withering pull of tragedy. All desperate pleas for love and redemption are returned stamped in red with "Address Unknown".

Solomon and Tummler are two teenagers killing time in Xenia, Ohio, a small town that has never recovered from the tornado that ravaged the community in the 1970s.

A budding gangster enthralls a freeloading young woman, soon taking advantage of her knack for hitch-hiking to rob middle-class, middle-aged men.

A dispossessed, violent man's life is a disastrous attempt to exist outside the social order. Successively deprived of parents and homes and with few other ties, he descends to the level of a cave dweller and falls deeper into crime and degradation.

James Gillespie is 12 years old. The world he knew is changing. Haunted by a secret, he has become a stranger in his own family. He is drawn to the canal where he creates a world of his own. He finds an awkward tenderness with Margaret Anne, a vulnerable 14 year old expressing a need for love in all the wrong ways, and befriends Kenny, who possesses an unusual innocence in spite of the harsh surroundings.

In a future where water is scarce, a farmer defends his land and hopes to rejuvenate his parched soil. However, his daughter's boyfriend schemes to steal the land for himself.

On the Wirral in the grim early years of Margaret Thatcher's premiership, the opportunities for thrill seeking young men looking to escape 9 to 5 drudgery are what they've always been: sex, drugs, rock n' roll, fashion, football and fighting.

When a young woman is cruelly and indiscriminately attacked by a notorious gang led by the violent Trey, her little 16 year old sister Kayla wants revenge and will stop at nothing to get it, even if it means joining a rival girl gang led by the volatile and damaged man-hating Danielle.

After transferring to a new school, a teenage girl finds her troubled past exposed when she innocently signs up for a singing club.

A pair of working-class brothers flee their Reno Motel after getting involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident.

Epic story about two families and their friendship and common destiny in Sweden's Gothenburg in the 1940s and 1950s. Told from the perspective of young Simon Larsson, who learns that he's an adopted child who has a Jewish father from Germany. After WWII Simon travels to explore his roots - a journey that leads to the basic mysteries of the human life. After the bestselling novel by Marianne Fredriksson.

In the Mexican-Guatemalan border, young teenage lovers, Sabina and Jovany, both Hondurans, accidentally meet again after some years without seeing each other. She plans to get to the United States and dreams about being a great singer; he commits all the required atrocities to be accepted by the gang: la Mara Salvatrucha. Sabina and Jovany crashed with the most adverse conditions at the border like white slavery, the Mexican and American migratory agents Burrona and Patrick, the brothel matron Doña Lita, Don Nico the Mexican Consul in Tecún Umán, the drug trafficking networks, the army and la Mara Salvatrucha.

An Indian Vietnam veteran trains five street punks in the Everglades to fight vice in Miami.

Two troubled adolescents chronicle the events that ultimately lead up to a terrifying assault on their school.

The psychological thriller "Murk" tells the story of Jacob, who is investigating into the circumstances surrounding his sister's death on her wedding night.

The true story of Chong Kim who, as a young teen, was abducted into the sex trade, and the complicated moral choices she had to make in order to survive as her situation grew more desperate.

When his mom deposits him at the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn to spend the summer with the grandfather he’s never met, young Flik may as well have landed on Mars. Fresh from his cushy life in Atlanta, he’s bored and friendless, and his strict grandfather, Enoch, a firebrand preacher, is bent on getting him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Only Chazz, the feisty girl from church, provides a diversion from the drudgery. As hot summer simmers and Sunday mornings brim with Enoch’s operatic sermons, things turn anything but dull as people’s conflicting agendas collide.

One summer, Dario flees the hellish environment of his home. Luismi, unconditional friend, a poor devil with pretensions of winning, and Antonia, an old woman who collects abandoned his motorcar furniture, become his new family. Three generations living together in a city too big to be alone.

In a village on the Hungarian border, two young brothers grow up during war time with their cruel grandmother and must learn every trick of evil to survive in the absurd world of adults.

NEDs (Non Educated Delinquents) is the story of a young man’s journey from prize-winning schoolboy to knife-carrying teenager. Struggling against the low expectations of those around him, John McGill changes from victim to avenger, scholar to NED, altar boy to glue sniffer. When he attempts to change back again, his new reality and recent past make conformity near impossible and violent self determination near inevitable.

Two brothers fight to escape a violent and poor neighborhood in Caracas by playing soccer. Daniel wishes to play professionally while Julio supports the family with dirty money. The opportunity of a lifetime comes when a talent scout invites them to the Caracas Football Club. The boys' mother dies in a shootout forcing each brother to decide what it is more important to them:family, revenge, or achieving their dreams.

The "Villa Virgin", a shantytown in the slums of Buenos Aires. Julian and Nicolas, two priests and long-standing friends, work tirelessly to help the local people. Julian uses his political connections to oversee the construction of a hospital. Nicolas joins him following the failure of a project he was leading in the jungle, after paramilitary forces assassinated members of the community. Deeply troubled, he finds a little comfort in Luciana, a young, attractive, atheist social worker. As Nicolas' faith weakens, tension and violence between the slum drug dealing cartels grow. And when work on the hospital is halted by ministerial decree, the fuse is lit...

Ensemble film revolving around characters living in Forest Gate, London. Over the course of a few days, six inter-linking stories explore issues of drug use, prostitution and urban poverty.

Caged tells the story of a teenage newlywed, who is sent to prison for being an accessory to a robbery. Her experiences while incarcerated, along with the killing of her husband, change her from a very frightened young girl into a hardened convict.

Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Rakshan Banietemad ends her eight-year hiatus from feature filmmaking with this ingenious, mosaic-like narrative, which knits together the stories of seven characters to create a microcosm of Iranian working-class society.

Eka and Natia leave their childhood behind and ignore societal customs to escape from their turbulent family lives.

Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.

Tuur and Lambert are best friends. But the war is closing in and is about to change their lives forever. Tuurs dad joined the resistance and even his big brother seems so be part of it. Lamberts family on the other hand choose to obey the Germans. Then a new girls from the city shows up, befriending the boys but telling her secret to only one of them. A choice that separates the boys and ultimately gets her in trouble.

A 14-year-old boy in a stifling Helsinki slum takes some unwise life lessons from his soon-to-be-incarcerated older brother, in Finnish master Pirjo Honkasalo’s gorgeously stylized and emotionally devastating work about what we pass on to younger generations, and the ways we do it.

The dysfunctional twenty-three years old Sarah takes her six year old natural son Jeremiah from the home of his beloved foster parents with the support of the social service to live with her. Along the years, the boy shares her insane and lowlife style and is introduced to booze and drugs and mentally, physically and sexually abused by Sarah, her lovers and her religiously fanatic family.

The story of a lone father's relationship with his daughter, of the destructive power of alcohol, of a child's vulnerability, but also of love, betrayal and socialist politics in 1970s Sweden. A unique and moving story freely based on Åsa Linderborg's best-selling novel.

Allide experienced The Great Terror under Stalin’s regime, and decades after her hometown people were deported to Siberia, she lives alone in an isolated house. One night, she finds a young woman in her yard – Zara has just escaped from the claws of the Russian mafia that held her as a sex slave. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in unearthing each other’s motives and gradually, and their stories merge into one, revealing the tragedy of a family during the cruelest years in Estonian history.

Boston, 1920. Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are charged and unfairly tried for murder on the basis of their anarchic political convictions.