A Dry White SeasonMovies like A Dry White Season
- Key Features:
- Apartheid, Social injustice, Political drama, Racial tension, Moral dilemma, Activism, Police brutality, Historical context, Oppression, Systemic racism, Cover-up, Loss of innocence, Transformation, Courage
- Tone:
- serious, dramatic, gritty
- Target Audience:
- History buffs, Social justice advocates, Drama enthusiasts, Viewers interested in South African history
- Emotional Arc:
- Ignorance → Awareness → Outrage
A Dry White Season

During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.
A Dry White Season
In the midst of a volatile regime change in a Francophone African state, Maria Vial is fighting to sustain her family’s coffee plantation. With rebels and the army struggling for control, French peacekeeping forces move out, warning the remaining white residents that they’re on their own. But Maria refuses to be driven off the land, even as tragedy looms.

Based on the true story of a black girl who was born to two white Afrikaner parents in South Africa during the apartheid era.

A dramatic story, based on actual events, about the friendship between two men struggling against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s. Donald Woods is a white liberal journalist in South Africa who begins to follow the activities of Stephen Biko, a courageous and outspoken black anti-apartheid activist.

Aaron Falk returns to his drought-stricken hometown to attend a tragic funeral. But his return opens a decades-old wound - the unsolved death of a teenage girl.

After a failed sabotage mission, a trio of anti-apartheid freedom fighters ends up in a tense bank hostage situation. Based on a true story.

A young art teacher hopes to be transferred to Istanbul after completing his mandatory duty in a remote village school in Anatolia. After accusations of inappropriate contact with a student surface, his hopes of escape fade and he descends further into an existential crisis.

Disgrace is the story of a South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his cherished daughter. After having an affair with a student, he moves to the Eastern Cape, where he gets caught up in a mess of post-apartheid politics.

In Rome it hasn’t rained for three years and the lack of water is overturning rules and habits. Through the city dying of thirst and prohibitions moves a chorus of people, young and old, marginalised and successful, victims and profiteers. Their lives are linked in a single design, while each seeks his or her deliverance.

The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth century Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides.

A union pensioner and his wife are robbed, but find that merely getting the assailants brought to justice is not enough for their consciences.

A teacher lives a lonely life, all the while struggling over his son’s custody. His life slowly gets better as he finds love and receives good news from his son, but his new luck is about to be brutally shattered by an innocent little lie.

In vivid images, the documentary-like story of a drover and his family in the northern badlands of Brazil during the drought. A family in the search of new hope and destiny.

Veteran homicide cop Fermanand his hot-headed partner İdris team up with rookie cop and anthropology major Hasan to investigate the murder of a young woman. The suspects include her conservative family, who might have killed her for honor, her drug-dealing boyfriend and aged billionaire Battal who had taken the victim as his second wife.

The true story of a white South African racist whose life was profoundly altered by the black prisoner he guarded for twenty years. The prisoner's name was Nelson Mandela.

A bright student in Nigeria takes on the academic establishment when she reports a popular professor who tried to rape her. Based on real events.

A scheming tobacco farmer sets out to ruin his competition by diverting the local water to his own property.

When five women take part in a corporate hiking retreat and only four come out on the other side, Federal Agents Aaron Falk and Carmen Cooper head deep into the Victorian mountain ranges to investigate in the hopes of finding their whistle-blowing informant, Alice Russell, alive.

A drama centered on two women who engage in a dangerous relationship during South Africa's apartheid era.

A Parisian teacher loses his cool when his teenage daughter tells him she plans to drop out of school and move in with her boyfriend.

A young lawyer defends a black man accused of murdering two white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter, sparking a rebirth of the KKK.

At New Mexico's Empire Zinc mine, Mexican-American workers protest the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages compared to their Anglo counterparts. Ramon Quintero helps organize the strike, but he is shown to be a hypocrite by treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza, with a similar unfairness. When an injunction stops the men from protesting, however, the gender roles are reversed, and women find themselves on the picket lines while the men stay at home.

When John Halder's latest novel is enlisted by powerful political figures in the Nazi party to push their agenda, his career and social standing instantly advance. But after learning of the Reich's horrific plans for the future and the devastating effects they will have on people close to him, John must decide whether or not to take a stand and risk losing everything.

An American reporter and an Afrikaans poet meet and fall in love while covering South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.

When a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female genital mutilation, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.

When two corrupt police officers investigate the brutal murder of a young girl, tensions come to a head in their small, racially-segregated town.

Renowned filmmaker John Wilson travels to Africa to direct a new movie, but constantly leaves to hunt elephants and other game, to the dismay of his cast and crew. He eventually becomes obsessed with hunting down and killing one specific elephant.

In Argentina, one daughter of patriarch Madariaga is married to a Frenchman while the other is married to a German thus leading to a crisis when Nazi Germany occupies France and some Madariaga family members fight on opposite sides.

The life and career of Andre Stander, a South African police officer turned bank robber.

A woman desperately races to save her child after police place her hometown on lockdown due to an active shooter incident.

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.

The oldest son of a loving and strong family of black sharecroppers comes of age in the Depression-era South after his father is imprisoned for stealing food.

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

The professional mercenary Sir William Walker instigates a slave revolt on the Caribbean island of Queimada in order to help improve the British sugar trade. Years later he is sent again to deal with the same rebels that he built up because they have seized too much power that now threatens British sugar interests.

Somewhere in Australia in the early 20th century outback, an Aboriginal man is accused of murdering a white woman. Three white men are on a mission to capture him with the help of an experienced Indigenous man.

A young man in 1981 South Africa must complete his brutal and racist two years of compulsory military service while desperately maintaining the secrecy of his homosexuality.

In the Old West, a 17-year-old Scottish boy teams up with a mysterious gunman to find the woman with whom he is infatuated.

A Mississippi district attorney and the widow of Medgar Evers struggle to bring a white supremacist to justice for the 1963 murder of the civil rights leader.

In 1870s New Mexico, a half-breed kills a bigoted sheriff in self-defense but the posse that eventually hunts him finds itself in dangerous territory.

A faithful retelling of the 1942 "Vel' d'Hiv Roundup" and the events surrounding it.

A chronicle of three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students through the eyes of substitute teacher, Henry Barthes. Henry roams from school to school, imparting modes of knowledge, but never staying long enough to form any semblance of sentient attachment.

Alice spends her days enslaved on a rural Georgia plantation, restlessly yearning for freedom. After a violent clash with plantation owner Paul, Alice flees through the neighboring woods and stumbles onto the unfamiliar sight of a highway, soon discovering the year is actually 1973.

When a schoolteacher is sacked, he projects his bad mood at his troubled teenage son. The son, in turn, buys a CD player from a pawnshop with counterfeit money. This starts a chain reaction of misery as every victim projects his problems on to another person.

When one of her students is suspected of theft, teacher Carla Nowak decides to get to the bottom of the matter. Caught between her ideals and the school system, the consequences of her actions threaten to break her.

In 1933, a young woman and her father discover an Alabama plantation whose inhabitants live as if slavery had never been abolished. Feeling a sense of duty to those behind the heavy gates, she stays to liberate the people and see them through their first harvest. With four of her father's colleagues and a lawyer, she faces the daunting task of resurrecting the place known as Manderlay.

A down-on-his-luck American Indian recently released from jail is offered the chance to "star" as the victim of a snuff film, the resulting pay of which could greatly help his poverty stricken family.

On October 2, 1968, a student uprising descends into violence after the Mexican government begins to use lethal force against the protesters.

A black police detective must solve a strange case of a kidnapped boy and deal with a big racial protest.

A comedy/drama set in a village and centered on a battle of the sexes, where women threaten to withhold sexual favours as long as the men refuse to install a water pipe.

A lawyer takes on a case of a prison guard in South Africa who is traumatized by the executions he's witnessed.

Jamie Fitzpatrick and Nona Alberts are two women from opposites sides of the social and economic track, but they have one thing in common: a mission to fix their community's broken school and ensure a bright future for their children. The two women refuse to let any obstacles stand in their way as they battle a bureaucracy that's hopelessly mired in traditional thinking, and they seek to re-energize a faculty that has lost its passion for teaching.

While investigating the global phenomenon of caste and its dark influence on society, a journalist faces unfathomable personal loss and uncovers the beauty of human resilience.

Diana Watts, a high school teacher in Austin, Texas, is in the midst of an affair with one of her students, Eric Tull. As the reality of their situation forces itself upon them, Diana puts the relationship on hold. It’s only a matter of time before she gives in again to her desire; this time even more recklessly than before.

In the 16th century in the Cévennes, a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas leads a happy and prosperous family life. When a lord treats him unjustly, this pious, upstanding man raises an army and puts the country to fire and sword in order to have his rights restored.

In 1980, Queens, New York, a young Jewish boy befriends a rebellious African-American classmate to the disapproval of his privileged family and begins to reckon with growing up in a world of inequality and prejudice.

In 1976, Argentina fell into the hands of a de facto government. Thousands of citizens are persecuted and kidnapped. This is the case of the parents of two children, who, knowing they are wanted, decide to hide.

The story of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who led a rebellion against the corrupt, oppressive dictatorship of president Porfirio Díaz in the early 20th century.

School nurse Alice Goodwin lives with her husband and two daughters on a dairy farm in a small Wisconsin community. After an accident on her property involving a friend's child, the town turns against her and Alice finds herself fighting charges of child abuse.

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 forever.

As a child, Ali Neuman narrowly escaped being murdered by Inkhata, a militant political party at war with Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. Only he and his mother survived the carnage of those years. But as with many survivors, the psychological scars remain.

Four corrupted fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual torture.

In 1986 Iran, Sahebjam, whose car breaks down in a remote village, enters into a conversation with Zahra, who relays to him the story about her niece, Soraya, whose arranged marriage to an abusive tyrant ended in tragedy.

An aged tailor recalls his life as the schoolteacher of a small village in Northern Germany that was struck by a series of strange events in the year leading up to WWI.

Love and unity in a school torn by racism and hate in the 1970s. A gifted high school football player must learn to embrace his talent and his faith as he battles racial tensions on and off the field.

Elle Marja, 14, is a reindeer-breeding Sami girl. Exposed to the racism of the 1930s and phrenological examinations at her boarding school, she starts dreaming of another life. To achieve this other life she has to become someone else and break all ties with her family and culture.

Warren Maxwell, the owner of a run-down plantation, pressures his son, Hammond, to marry and produce an heir to inherit the plantation. Hammond settles on his own cousin, Blanche, but purchases a sex slave when he returns from the honeymoon. He also buys his father a new Mandingo slave named Mede to breed and train as a prize-fighter.

During a hot Sunday afternoon in a small Southern Italian town, a school serving as a polling place is occupied by a group of three locals and an Eritrean immigrant, all unemployed, desperate and armed.

The escape of Bubber Reeves from prison affects the inhabitants of a small Southern town.

A Bedouin village in Northern Israel. When Jalila's husband marries a second woman, Jalila and her daughter's world is shattered, and the women are torn between their commitment to the patriarchal rules and being true to themselves.

The story takes place in alternative America where the blacks are members of social elite, and whites are inhabitants of inner city ghettos. Louis Pinnock is a white worker in a chocolate factory, loving husband and father of two children. While delivering a package for black CEO Thaddeus Thomas, he is mistaken for a voyeur and, as a result, loses his job, gets beaten by black cops and his family gets evicted from their home. Desperate Pinnock takes a gun and kidnaps Thomas, demanding justice.

Blaise Starrett is a rancher at odds with homesteaders when outlaws hold up the small town. The outlaws are held in check only by their notorious leader, but he is diagnosed with a fatal wound and the town is a powder keg waiting to blow.

A drama teacher's taboo relationship with an unstable student strikes a nerve in her jealous classmate, sparking a vengeful chain of events within their suburban high school that draws parallels to "The Crucible".

Two veterans of the Bosnian War, one American, one Serbian, clash in the remote Smoky Mountain wilderness.

The true story of anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, and particularly the life of Patrick Chamusso, a timid foreman at Secunda CTL, the largest synthetic fuel plant in the world. Patrick is wrongly accused, imprisoned and tortured for an attempt to bomb the plant, with the injustice transforming the apolitical worker into a radicalised insurgent, who then carries out his own successful sabotage mission.

In the 1950s, a Japanese-American fisherman is suspected of killing his neighbour at sea. For Ishmael, a local reporter, the trial strikes a deep emotional chord when he finds his ex-lover is linked to the case. As he investigates the killing, he uncovers some startling clues that lead him to a shocking discovery.

Thrown together under incredible circumstances, two strangers must discover courage and strength when they begin a journey across the treacherous African desert! Equipped only with their wits and the expertise of a native bushman who befriends them, they are determined to triumph over impossible odds and reach their destination. But along the way, the trio face a primitive desert wilderness.

Spurred by a white woman's lie, vigilantes destroy a black Florida town and slay inhabitants in 1923.

As a director and his crew shoot a controversial film about Christopher Columbus in Cochabamba, Bolivia, local people rise up against plans to privatize the water supply.

Based on true events about the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal State.

Set between the two World Wars and based on true historical events, Bitter Harvest conveys the untold story of the Holodomor, the genocidal famine engineered by the tyrant Joseph Stalin. The film displays a powerful tale of love, honour, rebellion and survival at a time when Ukraine was forced to adjust to the horrifying territorial ambitions of the burgeoning Soviet Union.

A small southwestern town sheriff finds a body in the desert with a suitcase and $500,000. He impersonates the man and stumbles into an FBI investigation.

Anthropology student Daria, who's helping a property developer build a village in the Los Angeles desert, and dropout Mark, who's wanted by the authorities for allegedly killing a policeman during a student riot, accidentally encounter each other in Death Valley and soon begin an unrestrained romance.

Harvard Law student Oliver Barrett IV and music student Jennifer Cavilleri share a chemistry they cannot deny - and a love they cannot ignore. Despite their opposite backgrounds, the young couple put their hearts on the line for each other. When they marry, Oliver's wealthy father threatens to disown him. Jenny tries to reconcile the Barrett men, but to no avail.

Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small town ways of his partner, a former sheriff.

Somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, Komona a 14-year-old girl tells her unborn child growing inside her the story of her life since she has been at war. Everything started when she was abducted by the rebel army at the age of 12.

With the mayoral election approaching, the newly-appointed state prosecutor of a small town suffering from a water supply crisis gradually descends into trouble after a young local woman is raped.

In a small seaside town, two schoolgirls are assaulted by a middle-aged man in a motel. Mia, a teenager who was working on reception that night, is the only witness. For fear of losing her job, she says nothing. Meanwhile, 12-year-old Wen, one of the victims, finds that her troubles have only just begun. Trapped in a world that offers them no safety, Mia and Wen will have to find their own way out.

On a family trip in the African desert, a research scientist unintentionally travels off course and is brutally murdered by an arms dealer. His girlfriend is put to the ultimate survival test as she attempts to evade the killers and protect his teenage daughter.

Over one intense day, the devoted head teacher of a last-chance reform school strives to keep his students in line while facing pressures of his own.

In 1960, a hardy group of prep school students boards an old-fashioned sailing ship. With Capt. Christopher Sheldon at the helm, the oceangoing voyage is intended to teach the boys fortitude and discipline. But the youthful crew are about to get some unexpected instruction in survival when they get caught in the clutches of a white squall storm.

"Selma," as in Alabama, the place where segregation in the South was at its worst, leading to a march that ended in violence, forcing a famous statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson that ultimately led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act.

A young teacher inspires her class of at-risk students to learn tolerance, apply themselves, and pursue education beyond high school.

A Harvard professor is lured back into the courtroom after twenty-five years to take the case of a young black man condemned to death for the horrific murder of a child.

A sugar-refinery worker flees his Northern Italy town after a woman refuses his marriage proposal.

After the end of Apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu meets with a brutal murderer seeking redemption.

When a grieving college professor confronts two hunters she catches trespassing on her property, she's drawn into an escalating battle of wills with catastrophic consequences.

In the arid landscape of Rajasthan, four women navigate their way through personal and cultural difficulties.

While holidaying in the French Alps, a Swedish family deals with acts of cowardliness as an avalanche breaks out.


