Poverty Movies

In 1960s Los Angeles an energetic widow and her six children try to make a dream of theirs come true: to have a home of their own. They leave L.A....

A young black man named Bigger Thomas takes a job working for a highly influential Chicago family, a decision that will change the course of his life...

A near-penniless drifter's journey to Alaska in search of work is interrupted when she loses her dog while attempting to shoplift food for it.

Biographic film chronicling the last year of the life of the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, 1919, who falls in love with a girl from a wealthy...

India. Smita is an untouchable. She dreams of seeing her daughter escape her miserable condition and enter school. Italy. Giulia works in her...

Right outside of Moscow – home to the highest number of billionaires pr. capita – you’ll find the largest junkyard in the world:...

A mother struggles to make a better life for her daughter.

Shuhei is leading a tough life. His alcoholic mother Akiko can only hook up with bad guys and order Shuhei to go get money from his disapproving...

A tale of revenge, honor and disgrace, centering on a poverty-stricken samurai who discovers the fate of his ronin son-in-law, setting in motion a...

A young girl whose father is an ex-convict and whose mother is a junkie finds it difficult to conform and tries to find comfort in a quirky...

Follows five sex workers employed at a Japanese brothel while the nation debates the passage of an anti-prostitution law.

In the late 19th century, two Swedish emigrants, Lasse Karlsson and his son Pelle, arrive on the Danish island of Bornholm hoping to find work on a...

Follows a young cyclo driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy's struggles to scratch out a...

Paris, 1930. Luis Buñuel is penniless after the scandal surrounding the release of his last movie. Sculptor Ramón Acín, a good...

Stuck in a mining town near Vladivostok in 1947 amongst Soviet exiles and Japanese POWs (Japanese prisoners remained in Siberia for years after the...

In Brooklyn circa 1900, the Nolans manage to enjoy life on pennies despite great poverty and Papa's alcoholism. We come to know these people well...

Oscar François de Jarjayes was born female, but her father insisted she be raised as a boy as he had no sons. She becomes the captain of the...

Norwegian immigrant Marta Hanson keeps a firm but loving hand on her household of four children, a devoted husband and a highly-educated lodger who...

This experimental documentary circulates around interviews with four veterans who worked all their lives in analogue (=celluloid) film laboratories...

Young, impulsive Rosetta lives a hard and stressful life as she struggles to support herself and her alcoholic mother. Refusing all charity, she is...