20 best movies like Samsara (2001)

In World War II, the widow Barny sees the Italian soldiers arriving in occupied Saint Bernard while walking to her job. Barny lives with her daughter and works correcting tests and feels a great attraction toward her boss Sabine. When the Germans arrive, Barny sends her half-Jewish daughter to live in a farm in the countryside and finds that Sabine's brother has been arrested and sent to a concentration camp. The atheist Barny decides to baptize her daughter to protect her and chooses priest Léon Morin to discuss with him themes related to religion and Catholicism and Léon lends books to her. Barny converts to the Catholicism and becomes closer to Léon, feeling an unrequited desire for him.

A, an American film director of Greek ancestry, is making a film that tells his story and the story of his parents. It is a tale that unfolds in Italy, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada and the USA. The main character is Eleni, who is claimed and claims the absoluteness of love. At the same time the film is a long journey into the vast history and the events of the last fifty years that left their mark on the 20th century. The characters in the film move as though in a dream. The dust of time confuses memories. A searches for them and experiences them in the present.

A woman's consuming love forces her to bear the clone of her dead beloved. From his infancy to manhood, she faces the unavoidable complexities of her controversial decision.

After the death of Lama Dorje, Tibetan Buddhist monks find three children — one American and two Nepalese — who may be the rebirth of their great teacher.

Years after declaring her eternal virginity and opting to live life as a man in the mountains of Albania, Hana looks to return to living as a woman as she settles into a new existence in modern-day Milan.

A haunting erotic fairytale about Lucy, a young University student drawn into a mysterious hidden world of beauty and desire.

Dean and Sal are the portrait of the Beat Generation. Their search for "It" results in a fast paced, energetic roller coaster ride with highs and lows throughout the U.S.

Simon, a young German doctor who lives and works in Marseille, goes missing. His appartment is empty. His mother Valérie is desperate. She doesn't understand the reason of his disappearance. Therefore she asks Jens, Simon's former boyfriend, to come to Marseille and help her find him.

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.

He had everything and wanted nothing. He learned that he had nothing and wanted everything. He saved the world and then it shattered. The path to enlightenment is as sharp and narrow as a razor's edge.

Circles (Serbian: Krugovi) is a Serbian movie based on the true story of a Serbian soldier who risked his life to protect a Muslim civilian during the war in Bosnia. During the war in Bosnia in 1993, a Serbian soldier pays for his life after protecting a Muslim civilian from being attacked by three other soldiers. 12 years later, the consequences of this act of heroism are still having their repercussions.

Harry is a retired teacher in his 70s living in the Upper West Side of New York City where his late wife and he raised his children--where he's lived all his life. When the building he lives in is torn down to make way for a parking garage, Harry and his beloved cat Tonto begin a journey across the United States, visiting his children, seeing a world he never seemed to have the time to see before, making new friends, and saying goodbye to old friends.

Walter Faber has survived a crash with an airplane. His next trip is by ship. On board this ship he meets the enchanting Sabeth and they have a passionate love affair. Together they travel to her home in Greece, but the rational Faber doesn't know what fate has in mind for him for past doings.

Spans 300 years in the life of one famed musical instrument that winds up in present-day Montreal on the auction block. Crafted by the Italian master Bussotti (Cecchi) in 1681, the red violin derives its unusual color from the human blood mixed into the finish. With this legacy, the violin travels to Austria, England, China, and Canada, leaving both beauty and tragedy in its wake.

A love story wrapped in a mystery. Set in Europe before WWII, professor of language and philosophy Dominic Matei is struck by lightning and ages backwards from 70 to 40 in a week, attracting the world and the Nazis. While on the run, the professor meets a young woman who has her own experience with a lightning storm. Not only does Dominic find love again, but her new abilities hold the key to his research.

Director Jean Renoir’s entrancing first color feature—shot entirely on location in India—is a visual tour de force. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the Bengal river around which their daily lives unfold. Enriched by Renoir’s subtle understanding and appreciation for India and its people, The River gracefully explores the fragile connections between transitory emotions and everlasting creation.

It's mid 19th century, north of France. The story of a coal miner's town. They are exploited by the mine's owner. One day the decide to go on strike, and then the authorities repress them

Drawing some intriguing parallels between the work of the prostitute and that of the psychiatrist-both have clients, both charge for sessions, both take on roles that serve the needs, psychological or otherwise, of those they serve, Jeanne Labrune's drama stars Isabelle Huppert and Bouli Lanners as, respectively, Alice, a disaffected call girl and Xavier, a shrink with a crumbling domestic situation.

A woman struggles with love and personal loss against the backdrop of a land torn by civil war in this drama from filmmaker Ozcan Alper. Sumru (Gaye Gursel) is a Turkish woman who studies ethnic music at a college in Istanbul and frequently makes field recordings of artists who practice rare and unusual forms. Sumru is struggling with loneliness after the disappearance of her Kurdish boyfriend, and for her latest project, she sets out on a lengthy road trip recording the stories of Kurdish women who have survived the murder of their Turkish husbands or lovers, hoping she might track down her man in her travels. After making her first stop in the city of Diyarbaki, Sumru meets Ahmet, who makes a living selling black market goods and shares her love of music and history. The two become fast friends, and as Ahmet joins Sumru on her travels, their relationship grows deeper, though she also becomes more aware of the tragedy that has gripped her country and the consequences of the civil war.

Alexander, a famous writer, is very ill and has only a few days to live. He meets a little boy on the street, who is an illegal immigrant from Albania. Alexander then takes the boy home.

When an aging matriarch starts showing signs of dementia, her dysfunctional family in Istanbul must navigate a minefield of unresolved issues to care for her.

Austrian mountaineer, Heinrich Harrer journeys to the Himalayas without his family to head an expedition in 1939. But when World War II breaks out, the arrogant Harrer falls into Allied forces' hands as a prisoner of war. He escapes with a fellow detainee and makes his way to Llaso, Tibet, where he meets the 14-year-old Dalai Lama, whose friendship ultimately transforms his outlook on life.

A married fisherman struggles to reconcile his devotion to his male lover within his town's rigid traditions.

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.

After the Portuguese government demolishes his slum and relocates him to a housing project on the outskirts of Lisbon, 75-year-old Cape Verde immigrant Ventura wanders between his new and old homes, reconnecting with people from his past.

In eighteenth-century France, a girl is forced against her will to take vows as a nun. Three mothers superior treat her in radically different ways, ranging from maternal concern, to sadistic persecution, to lesbian desire.

The wife of a Marine serving in Vietnam, Sally Hyde decides to volunteer at a local veterans hospital to occupy her time. There she meets Luke Martin, a frustrated wheelchair-bound vet who has become disillusioned with the war. Sally and Luke develop a friendship that soon turns into a romance.

Eliane Devries is the seemingly repressed owner of a prosperous rubber plantation in French Indochina, circa 1930. Her steely exterior, however, is only a mask intended to hide her torrid love affairs from upper class society

The story of Aung San Suu Kyi as she becomes the core of Burma's democracy movement, and her relationship with her husband, writer Michael Aris.

One winter night, Pilar runs away from home. With her, she takes only a few belongings and her son, Juan. Antonio soon sets out to look for her. He says Pilar is his sunshine, and what's more, "She gave him her eyes"...

A Himalayan legend of a love struggling against the inevitability of death, an astonishing tale spanning from the early 19th century mountain existence, to hectic, bustling modern day Tokyo.

Inspired by the true story of indomitable Kuki Gallmann, the film tells of a beautiful and inquisitive woman who had the courage to escape from her comfortable yet monotonous life in Italy to start anew in the African wilderness with her son, Emanuele, and her new husband, Paolo. Gallmann faces great danger there but eventually becomes a celebrated conservationist.

The story of former Hollywood star Grace Kelly's crisis of marriage and identity, during a political dispute between Monaco's Prince Rainier III and France's Charles De Gaulle, and a looming French invasion of Monaco in the early 1960s.

Eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner lives his last 25 years with gusto and secretly becomes involved with a seaside landlady, while his faithful housekeeper bears an unrequited love for him.

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure and misfortune in the convulsed Europe of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The O'Neills lived happily in their house in the Australian countryside. That was until one day fate struck blindly, taking the life of Peter, the father, leaving his grief-stricken wife Dawn alone with their four children. Among them, eight-year-old Simone denies this reality. She is persuaded that her father still lives in the giant fig tree growing near their house and speaks to her through its leaves. But the tree becomes more and more invasive and threatens the house. It must be felled. Of course, Simone won't allow it.

A drama set at a Swiss ski resort and centered on a boy who supports his sister by stealing from wealthy guests.

When 17-year-old Ben visits his father Heinrich in Marrakech, it is the start of an adventurous journey through a foreign country with a picturesque charm and a rough beauty where everything appears possible — including the chance that father and son will lose each other for good, or find one another again.

Blackfella Charlie is getting older, and he's out of sorts. The intervention is making life more difficult on his remote community, what with the proper policing of whitefella laws that don't generally make much sense, and Charlie's kin and ken seeming more interested in going along with things than doing anything about it. So Charlie takes off, to live the old way, but in doing so sets off a chain of events in his life that has him return to his community chastened, and somewhat the wiser.

In this story-within-a-story, Anna is an actress starring opposite Mike in a period piece about the forbidden love between their respective characters, Sarah and Charles. Both actors are involved in serious relationships, but the passionate nature of the script leads to an off-camera love affair as well. While attempting to maintain their composure and professionalism, Anna and Mike struggle to come to terms with their infidelity.

Meeting his handicapped son for the first time, a young father attempts to forge a relationship with the teenager.

In 1972, disenchanted about the dreary conventions of English life, 25-year-old Julia heads for Morocco with her daughters, six-year-old Lucy and precocious eight-year-old Bea.

Set in the 1960s, high school student Toru Watanabe loses his only friend Kizuki after he commits suicide. Toru, now looking for a new life, enters a university in Tokyo. By chance, Toru meets Kizuki's ex-girlfriend Naoko in the university. They grow close because they both share the same loss. As Toru and Naoko grow even closer, Naoko's sense of loss also grows. After Naoko's 20th birthday, she leaves for a sanitarium in Kyoto. Watanabe, devastated by the situation, meets pure-hearted Midori during the spring semester. Midori looks like a small animal that just came into the world ...

Set against the gorgeous landscape of Armenia, Here chronicles a brief but intense relationship between an American satellite-mapping engineer (Foster) and an expatriate photographer (Azabal) who impulsively decide to travel across the remote countryside. As their trip comes to an end, the two must decide where to go from Here

During Nazi occupation, red-headed Bent Faurschou-Hviid ("Flame") and Jørgen Haagen Schmith ("Citron"), assassins in the Danish resistance, take orders from Winther, who's in direct contact with Allied leaders. One shoots, the other drives. Until 1944, they kill only Danes; then Winther gives orders to kill Germans. When a target tells Bent that Winther's using them to settle private scores, doubt sets in, complicated by Bent's relationship with the mysterious Kitty Selmer, who may be a double agent. Also, someone in their circle is a traitor. Can Bent and Jørgen kill an über-target, evade capture, and survive the war? And is this heroism, naiveté, or mere hatred?

The night of August 24, 1572, is known as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. In France a religious war is raging. In order to impose peace a forced wedding is arranged between Margot de Valois, sister of the immature Catholic King Charles IX, and the Hugenot King Henri of Navarre. Catherine of Medici maintains her behind-the-scenes power by ordering assaults, poisonings, and instigations to incest.

A Romanian police officer teams up with a small crew of bank robbers to pull off a heist by convincing everyone at the scene of the crime that they are only filming a movie.

Elizabeth has just been through a particularly nasty breakup, and now she's ready to leave her friends and memories behind as she chases her dreams across the country. In order to support herself on her journey, Elizabeth picks up a series of waitress jobs along the way. As Elizabeth crosses paths with a series of lost souls whose yearnings are even greater than her own, their emotional turmoil ultimately helps her gain a greater understanding of her own problems...

Into Great Silence (German: Die Große Stille) is a documentary film directed by Philip Gröning that was first released in 2005. It is an intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in the French Alps (Chartreuse Mountains). The idea for the film was proposed to the monks in 1984, but the Carthusians said they wanted time to think about it. The Carthusians finally contacted Gröning 16 years later to say they were now willing to permit Gröning to shoot the movie, if he was still interested.

Salma Zidane, a widow, lives simply from her grove of lemon trees in the West Bank's occupied territory. The Israeli defence minister and his wife move next door, forcing the Secret Service to order the trees' removal for security. The stoic Salma seeks assistance from the Palestinian Authority, Israeli army, and a young attorney, Ziad Daud, who takes the case. In this allegory, does David stand a chance against Goliath?