The House of SandMovies like The House of Sand
- Key Features:
- Desert setting, Survival, Isolation, Marriage, Family saga, Historical drama, Adaptation, Resilience, Female protagonist, Tragedy, Loss
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- Drama viewers, Historical film enthusiasts, International cinema fans
- Emotional Arc:
- Hope → Despair → Acceptance
The House of Sand

A woman is taken along with her mother in 1910 to a far-away desert by her husband, and after his passing, is forced to spend the next 59 years of her life hopelessly trying to escape it.
The House of Sand
When her husband goes missing at the beach, a female professor begins to mentally disintegrate as her denial of his disappearance becomes delusional.

A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.

A rancher, his clairvoyant wife and their family face turbulent years in South America.

Based on Érico Verissimo's literary trilogy, Time and the Wind follows 150 years of the Terra Cambará family and their opponents, the Amaral family. The struggles between the two families begin in the missions and lasts until the end of the 19th century. The film also features the period of formation of the state of Rio Grande do Sul and the dispute of territory between the Portuguese and Spanish crowns.

A writer secludes himself in the mountains and falls in lust with local Berta. After realizing the oddities of the rural community the author starts to question the lines between reality and fiction.

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.

In an industrializing Italian town, a married woman, rendered mentally unstable after a traffic accident, drifts into an affair with a friend of her husband.

Behrani, an Iranian immigrant buys a California bungalow, thinking he can fix it up, sell it again, and make enough money to send his son to college. However, the house is the legal property of former drug addict Kathy. After losing the house in an unfair legal dispute with the county, she is left with nowhere to go. Wanting her house back, she hires a lawyer and befriends a police officer. Neither Kathy nor Behrani have broken the law, so they find themselves involved in a difficult moral dilemma.

Along with her husband and three children, Marthe lives in an eden of her own creation, nearly isolated from the rest of the world. The arrival of a construction vehicle, however, pierces their tranquil, hermetic existence—before long a disused highway has been re-opened, and the family finds their home situated in the midst of rush-hour traffic. While the privileges of clean air, quietude and privacy are thus denied them, Marthe remains determined to stay no matter the cost.

By a little bay near Marseille lies a picturesque villa owned by an old man. His three children have gathered by his side for his last days. It’s time for them to weigh up what they have inherited of their father’s ideals and the community spirit he created in this magical place. The arrival, at a nearby cove, of a group of boat people will throw these moments of reflection into turmoil.

A woman married to a former politician during the 1971 military dictatorship in Brazil is forced to reinvent herself and chart a new course for her family after a violent and arbitrary act.

The story of Dulce, a mother who has encounters with apparitions inside her old house. She must decipher a mystery that could trigger a prophecy: the death of her family.

A Cape Verdean woman navigates her way through Lisbon, following the scanty physical traces her deceased husband left behind and discovering his secret, illicit life.

A spoiled rich woman and a brutish Communist deckhand become stranded alone on a desert island after venturing away from their cruise.

Against the backdrop of a military dictatorship, Eugenia is reunited with her estranged family following her father’s stroke and is forced to confront dark secret.

Two detectives are tasked to investigate the murder of an old man, found bludgeoned to death in a Tokyo rail yard.

In 1911, a willful and determined man from peasant stock named Charles Saganne enlists in the military and is assigned to the Sahara Desert under the aristocratic Colonel Dubreuilh.

A woman in her sixties embarks on a journey through the western United States after losing everything in the Great Recession, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.

In the midst of a civil war, a pair of former violinists in a tempestuous marriage oversee a farm on a rural island. In spite of their best efforts to escape their homeland, the war impinges on every aspect of their lives.

The story of a family and a love affair told through the journey of a young woman called Suzanne.

Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo is assigned to the old Bastiani border fortress where he expects an imminent attack by nomadic fearsome Tartars.

After being a victim of rape within their own home, Diana chooses to keep the trauma secret. Mario, her husband, also has something to hide. The silence takes the couple's account over the day turns gradually into a peculiar form of violence.

The De La Mora siblings concoct a mischievous plan to break into their old family home to retrieve a hidden treasure of significant importance.

Middle-aged Gerald Kingsland advertises in a London paper for a female companion to spend a year with him on a desert island. The young Lucy Irving takes a chance on contacting him and after a couple of meetings they decide to go ahead. Once on the island things prove a lot less idyllic than in the movies, and gradually it becomes clear that it is Lucy who has the desire and the strength to try and see the year through.

A young woman inherits a mansion, only to discover that it is haunted by witches and evil spirits.

Cara Rudland thought she’d left her Southern roots and troubled family far behind, but returns to the scenic Lowcountry of her childhood summers after losing her job in Chicago. There, she reconnects with her mother Lovie, who has been caring for her young, pregnant friend Toy in her charming beach house.

A lonely beach on the southernmost coast of Brazil is the scene for two friends, on the brink of adulthood, to explore their understanding of themselves and one another. Martin has been sent by his father to retrieve what appears to be an inheritance-related document from the family of his recently deceased and estranged grandfather. Tomaz accompanies him, seemingly hoping to regain some of their former closeness. The two boys shelter themselves in a glass house, in front of a cold and stormy sea.

One weekend, after years without seeing each other, several friends, over whom hangs the shadow of a murky episode of the past, meet in a house in the mountains. During the first night, a strange incident takes place that leaves them isolated.

After her mother's death, six-year-old Frida is sent to her uncle's family to live with them in the countryside. But Frida finds it hard to forget her mother and adapt to her new life.

Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.

A young girl recounts her girlhood and eventual marriage to a general of the Mexican revolution. by one of the most outstanding writers of the new feminist Mexican literature, it is at once a haunting novel of one woman's life and a powerful account of post-revolutionary Mexico from a female perspective.

A large and beautiful property on the French Riviera. A place that seems out of time and sheltered from the rest of the world. Anna goes there with her daughter for a few days of vacation. Amidst her family, friends and the house staff, Anna has to handle her fresh break-up with her partner and the writing of her next film.

Lucía and her son live isolated from society in a flat place where there’s practically no life. The small family unit formed by mother and son hardly ever receives visitors, and their goal is to lead a quiet existence. At first they succeed, but the appearance of a mysterious, violent creature that starts stalking their small house will put the relationship that unites them to the test.

A small village in Huelva, Andalusia, Spain, 1936. Higinio and Rosa have been married only for a few months when the Civil War breaks out. Higinio, being afraid of possible reprisals from the rebel faction, decides to use a hole dug in his own house as a temporary hideout.

A woman inexplicably finds herself cut off from all human contact when an invisible, unyielding wall suddenly surrounds the countryside. Accompanied by her loyal dog Lynx, she becomes immersed in a world untouched by civilization and ruled by the laws of nature.

A father and daughter journey from Denmark to an unknown desert that exists in a realm beyond the confines of civilization.

After making a harrowing escape from war-torn South Sudan, a young refugee couple struggle to adjust to their new life in a small English town that has an unspeakable evil lurking beneath the surface.

On his way out of the wilderness, Jesus struggles with the Devil over the fate of a family in crisis, setting himself up for a dramatic test.

A disciplined and sexually driven man forces his family to stay isolated in their home in order to protect them from the “evil nature” of human beings.

Montse, divorced and with two children who have long ignored her, prepares for a family reunion at her home on the Costa Brava.

In a war-ridden country, a woman watches over her husband, comatose from a bullet in the neck and abandoned by Jihad companions and brothers. One day, the woman decides to say things to him she could never have done before.

Ten years have gone by since Elena's six-year old son has disappeared. The last thing she heard of him was a phone call he gave her, saying that he was lost on a beach in France and couldn't find his father. Nowadays, Elena lives on this same beach and manages a restaurant. She is finally beginning to emerge from this tragic episode when she meets a French teenager who strongly reminds her of her lost son. The two of them will embark on a relationship which will sow chaos and distrust around them.

"The Family," an album with a velvet cover, is meant to touch the extended family of man. Formal portraits, bookends in this 80-year saga, enclose the central story, which opens with the baptism of Carlo, a baby in his grandfather's lap, and ends with Carlo as a grandfather with a baby in his arms. And never once do we get out of the house, whose rooms provide the film's structure. Comfort or passion? Carlo couldn't really decide until it was too late.

The tale of an extraordinary family, the Madrigals, who live hidden in the mountains of Colombia, in a magical house, in a vibrant town, in a wondrous, charmed place called an Encanto. The magic of the Encanto has blessed every child in the family—every child except one, Mirabel. But when she discovers that the magic surrounding the Encanto is in danger, Mirabel decides that she, the only ordinary Madrigal, might just be her exceptional family's last hope.

In the Bolivian altiplano, Virginio and Sisa, an elderly Quechua couple who have lived a quiet life for years, face an impossible dilemma during an unusually long drought: resist or be defeated by the hostile environment and the relentless passage of time.

Alfonso is an old farmer who has returned home to tend to his son, who is gravely ill. He rediscovers his old house, where the woman who was once his wife still lives, with his daughter-in-law and grandson. The landscape that awaits him resembles a wasteland. Vast sugar cane plantations surround the house, producing perpetual clouds of ash. 17 years after abandoning them, Alfonso tries to fit back in and save his family.

Raquel has been the live-in housekeeper for a kind, reasonably wealthy family for half her life, and the joyless repetition of the job has begun to take its toll. Increasingly dependent on painkillers, Raquel resorts to pranks and childish avoidance to antagonize the family’s college-age daughter and a procession of new servants, all in the hopes of protecting her precarious power within the home. Her antics successfully push everyone away, until new maid Lucy actually pushes back.

Marc and Rebeca, a young couple, travel to an old country house that used to belong to their family. Once there, they write the shared history of their roots, creating a huge family tree that harbours relationships of love, heartbreak, sex, madness, jealousy and infidelity, and under which also lies a history laden with secrets.

At dawn, Clarisse takes a last look at her husband and two sleeping children, hesitates to leave a note, and hits the road. A desperate escape that gradually reveals its layers as Clarisse — who seems to have an extra-sensory connection to the family she has left behind — loses herself in the world.

Fausta is suffering from a rare disease called the Milk of Sorrow, which is transmitted through the breast milk of pregnant women who were abused or raped during or soon after pregnancy. While living in constant fear and confusion due to this disease, she must face the sudden death of her mother. She chooses to take drastic measures to not follow in her mother's footsteps.

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.

Together for 20 years, a couple that has grown apart over time receives difficult news that will impact the entire family. As they try to make sense of the changes, they end up rediscovering their love for one another.

A couple becomes lost in a massive storm and seek refuge at a nearby farmhouse, only to be captured by deranged killers.

Jen's romantic getaway with her wealthy married boyfriend is disrupted when his friends arrive for an impromptu hunting trip. Tension mounts at the house until the situation culminates in an unexpected way.

Martinón is the last inhabitant of Auzal, a village in the mountains where he lives in communion with nature. He only goes down to the valleys twice a year to trade and to buy provisions. But one day he’s convinced to take a wife, a decision intended to soften his calloused soul—but in some ways his real struggle is only just beginning.

To find Joseba, a dying friend, and see him reunite with his daughter Ely, two old friends, Jean Pierre and Tocho, embark with her on a road trip through the Sahara desert, from Spain to Mali.

A woman recalls her childhood growing up in the North of Spain, focusing on her relationship with her father.

In Colombia just after the Great War, an old man falls from a ladder; dying, he professes great love for his wife. After the funeral, a man calls on the widow - she dismisses him angrily. Flash back more than 50 years to the day Florentino Ariza, a telegraph boy, falls in love with Fermina Daza, the daughter of a mule trader.

The story of a long-lost book that mysteriously reappears and connects an old man searching for his son with a girl seeking a cure for her mother's loneliness.

A mother attempts to keep her family safe as war rages and a sniper lies in wait outside her home.

After her estranged brother's sudden death, young wife Lucia bonds with his fiancée through their shared grief and finds herself falling in love.

A woman has a close bond with her beloved Algeriann grandfather, who protected her from a toxic home life as a child; his death triggers a deep identity crisis as tensions between her extended family members escalate, revealing new depths of resentment and bitterness.

The film spans 30 years in Julieta’s life from a nostalgic 1985 where everything seems hopeful, to 2015 where her life appears to be beyond repair and she is on the verge of madness.

A film set in the Spanish side of the Basque Country, beginning in the Carlist war of 1875 and ending during the Spanish Civil war of 1936. The film portrays how one single act of cowardice shapes the life of the next three generations of two families and fuels the intense rivalry which will span the next sixty-one years.

The thirteen survivors of a catastrophe by a tunnel's collapse tries to balance their experience trapped along 15 days inside it with their day-by-day outside it.

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.

In a small village in Västergötland, everything is turned upside-down when the local loner dies and his cottage is inherited by his unknown relative Fanny. She rides into town on a big black motorcycle with her androgynous boyfriend Zack, wearing black leather and spikes. When they decide to stay, Flogfält's plans to buy the cottage are upset.

Orense, Spain, 1940, just after the end of the Civil War. Every time Elena locks the door of her home, she and her children become the faithful guardians of a sacred secret: Ricardo, her husband, their father, hides in the house, trying to avoid the brutal political persecution of the victors, who hunt, as if they were wild animals, and imprison or execute, those who have lost the bloody and tragic struggle…

Lizzy is a tough, resourceful frontierswoman settling a remote stretch of land on the 19th-century American frontier. Isolated from civilization in a desolate wilderness where the wind never stops howling, she begins to sense a sinister presence that seems to be borne of the land itself, and when a newlywed couple arrive at a nearby homestead, their presence amplifies Lizzy's fears, setting into motion a shocking chain of events.

Karin hopes to recover from her recent stay at a mental hospital by spending the summer at her family's cottage on a tiny island. Her husband, Martin, cares for her but is frustrated by her physical withdrawal. Her younger brother, Minus, is confused by Karin's vulnerability and his own budding sexuality. Their father, David, cannot overcome his haughty remoteness. Beset by visions, Karin descends further into madness.

Raimunda, a working-class woman living in Madrid, is dealing with the aftermath of a fire that killed her parents in her native village in La Mancha. Raimunda's life is further complicated when her deceased mother, Irene, returns as a ghost to resolve unfinished family business, including a murder and other buried truths.

A Swedish immigrant family struggles to adapt to their new life on the American frontier during the second half of the 19th century amidst civil war, native uprising and the lure of gold in California.

Amid the sweltering summer heat in northern Argentina, two middle-class families retreat to a crumbling country estate and a modest townhouse, where strained relationships, simmering tensions, and the presence of children and servants quietly expose the fractures of family life. Between idle days, gossip, and unspoken desires, the boundaries of class, tradition, and faith are reflected in their everyday interactions.

A biography of artist Frida Kahlo, who channeled the pain of a crippling injury and her tempestuous marriage into her work.

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

In post–civil war Spain, 10-year-old Ofelia moves with her pregnant mother to live under the control of her cruel stepfather. Drawn into a mysterious labyrinth, she meets a faun who reveals that she may be a lost princess from an underground kingdom. To return to her true father, she must complete a series of surreal and perilous tasks that blur the line between reality and fantasy.

In 1856, two women forge a close connection despite their isolation on the American frontier.

Laura and her father Wilson arrive at a cottage off the beaten path in order to repair it since its owner will soon put the house on sale. They will spend the night there in order to start the repairs the following morning. Everything seems to go on smoothly until Laura hears a sound that comes from outside and gets louder and louder in the upper floor of the house. Wilson goes up to see what is going on while she remains downstairs on her own waiting for her father to come down. The plot is based on a true story that occurred in the 1940s in a small village in Uruguay. La casa muda focuses on the last seventy eight minutes, second by second, as Laura tries to leave the house unharmed and discovers the dark secret it hides.

A chronicle of Gertrude Bell's life, a traveler, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer, and political attaché for the British Empire in the Near and Middle East at the dawn of the twentieth century. Her knowledge of the tribal leaders is used by the British to establish the Kingdoms of Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

An English slave trader is marooned on a remote tropical island, forced to fend for himself and deal with crushing loneliness.

A Danish officer, Michael, is sent away to the International Security Assistance Force operation in Afghanistan for three months. His first mission there is to find a young radar technician who had been separated from his squad some days earlier. While on the search, his helicopter is shot down and he is taken as a prisoner of war, but is reported dead to the family.

Petra heads to New York in search of her older sister after a long time of being separated. They are both movie actresses and heirs of the wounds of the Brazilian dictatorship. But Petra has only a few clues: home movies, newspaper clippings, a diary...

The dawn of the 20th century: L’Apollonide, a luxurious and traditional brothel in Paris, is living its last days. In this closed world, where some men fall in love and others become viciously harmful, the women share their secrets, their fears, their joys and their pains.

Ten years after the Black Death devastated the country, a poor family sets out on a journey to search for better living conditions. In a deserted mountain pass, they are attacked by a gang of ruthless killer thieves. The only one spared is 19 year old Signe. She is taken prisoner, and the gang brings her back to their camp. Here, she soon learns that they have a fate worse than death in store for her, and realises that her only hope is to escape.

An ordinary woman makes an extraordinary decision which will change her life forever.

When a young mother's home birth ends in unfathomable tragedy, she begins a year-long odyssey of mourning that fractures relationships with loved ones in this deeply personal story of a woman learning to live alongside her loss.

A poverty-stricken woman raises her sons through many trials and tribulations. But no matter the struggles, always sticks to her own moral code.

On the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Irene has only a few days to overcome her anxiety and renew her strength before sending her eldest son out into the world.

A woman and her daughter struggle to make their way through the aftermath of the Balkan war.

Tragedy strikes a married couple vacationing in the Moroccan desert, which jumpstarts an interlocking story involving four different families.

Set in the Mayan civilization, when a man's idyllic presence is brutally disrupted by a violent invading force, he is taken on a perilous journey to a world ruled by fear and oppression where a harrowing end awaits him. Through a twist of fate and spurred by the power of his love for his woman and his family he will make a desperate break to return home and to ultimately save his way of life.

After four years apart, Ahmad returns to his wife Marie in Paris in order to progress their divorce. During his brief stay, he cannot help noticing the strained relationship between Marie and her daughter Lucie. As he attempts to improve matters between mother and daughter Ahmad unwittingly lifts the lid on a long buried secret...

The four wives of four brothers share stories of their marriages as they wait for their husbands in a small, secluded cottage.

Brazilian badlands, April 1910. Tonho is ordered by his father to avenge the death of his older brother. The young man knows that if he commits this crime, his life will be divided in two: the twenty years he has already lived and the few days he has left to live, before the other family avenges their son's death. He is torn between fulfilling his ancestral duty and rebelling against it, urged by his younger brother Pacu. That's when a tiny travelling circus passes through the vast badlands where Tonho's family lives.

After World War II, a woman refuses to believe her husband, missing on the Russian front, is dead. Flashbacks reveal their brief courtship and marriage. Years later, she travels to Russia with his photo, determined to find him. What will she discover?

Somaieh, the youngest daughter of an indigent family, is getting married and fear is overwhelming each and every member of the family regarding how to overcome their difficulties after she's gone.



