The Island on Bird StreetMovies like The Island on Bird Street
- Key Features:
- World War II, Survival, Child protagonist, Hiding, Nazis, Concentration camp, Loss, Resilience, Historical drama, Family separation
- Tone:
- serious, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- Historical drama enthusiasts, WWII narratives, Coming-of-age stories
- Emotional Arc:
- Fear → Hope
The Island on Bird Street

Alex is an 11-year old boy who, during WWII, hides in the Jewish ghetto from Nazis after all his relatives have been sent to the concentration camp. The movie portrays the ghetto through his eyes.
The Island on Bird Street
After losing his parents, a young Jewish boy wanders Eastern Europe, seeking refuge during World War II.

Norway, 1942, during World War II. After being separated from her family, Esther, a young Jewish girl from Trondheim, arrives at an isolated farm where she must assume a new identity in order to survive the Nazi persecution.

A Jewish boy separated from his family in the early days of WWII poses as a German orphan and is taken into the heart of the Nazi world as a 'war hero' and eventually becomes a Hitler Youth.

A 12-year-old boy manages to flee a Communist concentration camp on his own, through sheer will and determination. All he has in his possession is a loaf of bread, a letter to deliver to someone in Denmark, and a compass to help get him there.

The story of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who went into hiding with her family in Amsterdam and became a victim of the Holocaust.

The true, harrowing story of a young Jewish girl who, with her family and their friends, is forced into hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

A Jewish boy living in Amsterdam at the onset of World War II is taken to a concentration camp with his parents. Based on the memoir of Holocaust survivor Jona Oberski.

Two Jewish boys escape from a train transporting them from one concentration camp to another. Ultimately, they are hunted down by a group of old, armed home-guardists.

Teenagers Birdboy and Dinki have decided to escape from an island devastated by ecological catastrophe: Birdboy by shutting himself off from the world, Dinki by setting out on a dangerous voyage in the hope that Birdboy will accompany her.

When his family moves from their home in Berlin to a strange new house in Poland, young Bruno befriends Shmuel, a boy who lives on the other side of the fence where everyone seems to be wearing striped pajamas. Unaware of Shmuel's fate as a Jewish prisoner or the role his own Nazi father plays in his imprisonment, Bruno embarks on a dangerous journey inside the camp's walls.

Four children dream of escaping the tedium of a summer holiday with their mother. When finally given permission to camp on their own on an island in the middle of a vast lake, they are overjoyed. But when they get there they discover they may not be alone… The battle for ownership of a lonely island teaches them the skills of survival, the value of friendship and the importance of holding your nerve.

A Yenish boy is placed in a mental hospital and experiences the Nazi euthanasia program. Aware of what was happening and attached to friends, the lad attempts to sabotage the program. The film addresses the complexities of the program director, the lives of the child victims, and the struggles of the child protagonist. More than five thousand children died in the Nazi euthanasia program.

12-year-old Bailey lives with her single dad Bug and brother Hunter in a squat in North Kent. Bug doesn’t have much time for his kids, and Bailey, who is approaching puberty, seeks attention and adventure elsewhere.

In World War II London, nine-year-old George is evacuated to the countryside by his mother, Rita, to escape the bombings. Defiant and determined to return to his family, George embarks on an epic, perilous journey back home as Rita searches for him.

When their plane crashes, 25 schoolboys find themselves trapped on a tropical island, miles from civilization.

During World War II in the freezing winter of 1944-45 the western Netherlands are in the grip of a famine. Many people move east to provide for their families. Fourteen year old Michiel can't wait to join the Dutch resistance, to the dismay of his father, who, as mayor, works to prevent escalations in the village.

A 12-year-old Jewish boy hides with a family of Catholic peasant farmers to escape the Nazis.

Based on the Depression-era bildungsroman memoir of writer A. E. Hotchner, the film follows the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis after his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. His father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch Company, is off on long trips from which the boy cannot be certain he will return.

On a winter morning, a mother goes to waken her son Heinrich; his bed is empty. She leaves her flat to find him. The neighbors' door, with a Star of David painted on it, is ajar, the furnishings in disarray, the family gone. She asks passersby, runs to the police then on to the rail yard. Flashbacks show that Heinrich and the neighbors' son Paul are six years old and best friends. Paul's family's deportation is expected soon; Heinrich's mother tells her son that they're going to Toyland. Heinrich wants to go with them, has a bag packed, and listens for their departure. His mother realizes he's joined them, and her resolve becomes more urgent. Will she arrive in time to save Heinrich?

A young Jewish girl, Sara, is looking to escape the clutches of the Third Reich after seeing her parents and sister brutally slain by a smuggler who betrayed them while attempting to escape to England. Terrified, she is sheltered by her childhood friend Jean, a homosexual in a clandestine relationship with his lover Philippe.

After being expelled from Beecher Prep for his treatment of a classmate with a facial deformity, Julian has struggled to fit in at his new school. To transform his life, Julian's grandmother finally reveals her own story of courage of her youth in Nazi-occupied France, where a classmate shelters her from mortal danger.

Run Boy Run is the true story of Jurek, an eight-year-old boy, who escapes from the Warsaw ghetto, then manages to survive in the woods and working as a farmhand, disguising himself as a Polish orphan. He encounters people who will betray him for a reward, who will beat him up or try to kill him, and he meets those, who will do and risk almost everything to help him. Jurek’s resilience is put to the ultimate test, when an accident cripples him, making it harder to find work. But he struggles on against all odds. Eventually the Russians reach his area and Jurek even finds a family where he could stay. Yet he is betrayed again, and a young man from a Jewish orphanage forcefully tries to bring Jurek back to his people and his faith.

Four young Jews survive the Third Reich in the middle of Berlin by living so recklessly that they become "invisible."

While the Second World War rages, the teenage Mahito, haunted by his mother's tragic death, is relocated from Tokyo to the serene rural home of his new stepmother Natsuko, a woman who bears a striking resemblance to the boy's mother. As he tries to adjust, this strange new world grows even stranger following the appearance of a persistent gray heron, who perplexes and bedevils Mahito, dubbing him the "long-awaited one."

In 1942, in an occupied Paris, the apolitical grocer Edmond Batignole lives with his wife and daughter in a small apartment in the building of his grocery. When his future son-in-law and collaborator of the German Pierre-Jean Lamour calls the Nazis to arrest the Jewish Bernstein family, they move to the confiscated apartment. Some days later, the young Simon Bernstein escapes from the Germans and comes to his former home. When Batignole finds him, he feels sorry for the boy and lodges him, hiding Simon from Pierre-Jean and also from his wife. Later, two cousins of Simon meet him in the cellar of the grocery. When Pierre-Jean finds the children, Batignole decides to travel with the children to Switzerland.

In 1953, a sensitive French boy finds out from a neighbor that his family's Jewish. François Grimbert becomes a physician, and gradually peels the layers of his buried family history which resulted in his difficult upbringing, raised as Catholic by his "Aryan" appearing parents. His athletic father labored to stamp out stereotypical Jewish characteristics he perceived in his son, to keep the family's many secrets, as most relatives fought in World War II, and later were hauled off to labor and death camps by the Gestapo.

A fictional story within the historical context of the disastrous flood that engulfed the Dutch coastal province of Zeeland in 1953. When their farmhouse is destroyed by the flood, teenage mother Julia gets separated from her baby boy, whom she kept hidden in a box. She is saved from drowning by a young air force lieutenant, who agrees to go help looking for Julia's little son.

Stach is a wayward teen living in squalor on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Guided by an avuncular Communist organizer, he is introduced to the underground resistance—and to the beautiful Dorota. Soon he is engaged in dangerous efforts to fight oppression and indignity, maturing as he assumes responsibility for others’ lives. A coming-of-age story of survival and shattering loss, A Generation delivers a brutal portrait of the human cost of war.

After a mysterious force decimates the world’s population, Sebastian must navigate his own survival journey through the desolate streets of Barcelona. As he forms uneasy alliances with other survivors and they try to escape the city, an unexpected and even more sinister threat grows.

At the beginning of the 1940s, in a France occupied by Nazi forces, lived the Jewish Joffo family. Happy and tight-knit, she sees her future darken when all members of the family are forced to wear the yellow star. Fearing the worst, the parents organized their family to flee to the free zone in the south of the country. Maurice, twelve years old, and Joseph, ten years old, will therefore leave alone in order to maximize their chances of finding their older brothers already settled in Nice. The brothers left to their own devices demonstrate an incredible amount of cleverness, courage, and ingenuity to escape the enemy invasion and to try to reunite their family once again.

A Hungarian youth comes of age at Buchenwald during World War II. György Köves is 14, the son of a merchant who's sent to a forced labor camp. After his father's departure, György gets a job at a brickyard; his bus is stopped and its Jewish occupants sent to camps. There, György find camaraderie, suffering, cruelty, illness, and death. He hears advice on preserving one's dignity and self-esteem. He discovers hatred. If he does survive and returns to Budapest, what will he find? What is natural; what is it to be a Jew? Sepia, black and white, and color alternate to shade the mood.

Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.

Madagascar, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. On an air base of the French army, the soldiers live the last carefree years of colonialism. Influenced by his readings of Fantômette, Thomas, a child who is not yet 10 years old, gradually forges a look at the world around him.

An eight-year-old boy is willing to do whatever it takes to end World War II so he can bring his father home. The story reveals the indescribable love a father has for his little boy and the love a son has for his father.

In the aftermath of the most devastating conflict mankind had ever experienced, the tiny island of Shikotan became part of the Sakhalin Oblast... and on the unhealed border in this remote corner of the world, friendship among children from two different countries timidly blossomed, striving to overcome language barriers and the waves of history. Inspired by true events.

A 12-year-old boy from Brooklyn tries to unite his half-Israeli and half-Palestinian family through cooking.

On the outskirts of Brooklyn, Frankie, an aimless teenager, suffocates under the oppressive glare cast by his family and a toxic group of delinquent friends. Struggling with his own identity, Frankie begins to scour hookup sites for older men.

Taking place at the Concentration camp Buchenwald at the end of March 1945, prisoner Hans Pippig discovers in a carrying case of an incoming prisoner a Jewish child. If reported the three-year-old is sure to die. On the other hand, a violation of the rules of the camp would threaten the long prepared uprising of the concentration camp prisoners against the SS.

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.

In 1933 in Berlin. Anna is only nine years old when her life changes from the ground up. To escape the Nazis, her father Arthur Kemper, a well-known Jewish journalist, has to flee to Zurich. His family, Anna, her twelve-year-old brother Max and her mother Dorothea, follow him shortly thereafter. Anna has to leave everything behind, including her beloved pink rabbit, and to face a new life full of challenges and privations abroad.

Handed over to foster care by his mother—who's unwilling to give up permanent custody—the now-adolescent François understands that nothing in life is permanent, and his increasingly erratic actions reflect this knowledge.

The story of Anne Frank and her friend, Hanneli Goslar, their first meeting in Amsterdam, their daily lives, the German occupation, and their sudden separation when the Frank family went into hiding.

1840 and another ship crashes on the rocks of an almost deserted island in Scotland. Three sailors survive the wreck and make it to shore where the few locals take them in as they wait for the mainland boat to come for them. But the sailors' survival story has only just started as they uncover the strange past of the once vibrant island.

Fanny is a Jewish girl in a French orphanage in 1943. When she and her friends are no longer safe from the Nazis, they try to flee to Switzerland. After their guide disappears, Fanny has to take the lead and help the other kids make it over the mountains.

In 1942, the young Jewish girl Misha, her Russian mother Gerusha and her German father Reuven hide from the Germans in a small house in Ardennes, Belgium. Misha is very connected to her mother that advises her that if one day a person comes to her saying "love of my life", she would follow him or her without any question. When her parents are captured by the Nazis, Misha is delivered to a German family and the abusive matriarch gives a bad treatment to the girl. However, she finds support in the family of Ernest and his deranged wife Marthe that supplies groceries to foster family. Misha loves Ernest's dogs and the old man gives a compass to her and tells that her parents have been sent to East to forced labor. When the old couple is denounced for sheltering the girl and arrested by the Germans, Misha flees through the woods heading east. Along her journey seeking out her parents...

In seaside Italy, a Holocaust survivor with a daycare business takes in a 12-year-old street kid who recently robbed her.

Forced to give up his dreams of art school, Zach works dead-end jobs to support his sister and her son. Questioning his life, he paints, surfs and hangs out with his best friend, Gabe. When Gabe's older brother returns home for the summer, Zach suddenly finds himself drawn into a relationship he didn't expect.

The dark secrets of a seemingly peaceful island threaten to swallow up an orphaned student when he grows close to a mysterious new teacher.

On the edge of a crumbling city, 11-year-old Alexander lives in a sequestered commune alongside other children, their mothers, and charismatic leader, Gregori. Gregori teaches the children how to raise livestock, grow vegetables, work as a community - and how to kill. With the birth of a new baby brother weighing on his mind, Alexander begins to question Gregori’s overpowering influence on the children and their training to become assassins. Threatened by his increasing unwillingness to fall in line, Gregori’s behavior turns erratic and adversarial toward the child he once considered a son. With the two set dangerously at odds and the commune’s way of life disintegrating, the residents fear a violent resolution is at hand.

Two young men are seriously affected by the Vietnam War. One of them has always been obsessed with birds - but now believes he really is a bird, and has been sent to a mental hospital. Can his friend help him pull through?

A young Norwegian boy in 1850s England goes to work as a cabin boy and discovers some of his shipmates are actually pirates.

Set in France during the struggle for Algerian independence, Messaoud's mother is terminally ill and his father, needing to work long hours in the factory, can't look after him, so decides to put him and his older brother Abdel in foster care. Sent to the countryside, Abdel has to work on a farm, but Messaoud is taken in by a childless woman, who conceals his Arab origins from her fiercely Gaullist ex-army husband. Re-named Michel/Michou, and with his hair comically dyed blond, the young boy quickly steals the hearts of both foster-parents, and eventually is instrumental in saving their troubled marriage.

Determined to survive at any price, Edith, a young Jewish woman deported to an extermination camp, manages to survive by accepting the role of kapo, a privileged prisoner whose mission is to ruthlessly guard other prisoners.

Two young brothers are abandoned by their mother during summer of 1948, they run into the forest and survive there for seven years.

A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.

The coming-of-age tale of 16-year-old Lina Vilkas who is deported to Siberia amid Stalin's reign of terror in the Baltic region during WWII. An aspiring artist, she secretly documents her harrowing journey with her drawings.

As the youngest of the family, Sam is haunted by the notion that someday he could become the last remaining survivor, all alone. On a family vacation at the beach, he meets the unconventional Tess, who carries her own secrets around with her and shows him how the present moment can win out over memories and anxiety about what’s yet to come.

British RAF Wing Commander James Wright is captured by the Japanese during WWII and forced to fight in brutal hand-to-hand combat. The Japanese soldiers get more than they bargained for when Wright’s years of martial arts training in Hong Kong prove him to be a formidable opponent.

Young Tom and his misfit friends fight to save 'Buster' the baby elephant during the German air raid bombings of Belfast in 1941.

In 1943, a childless couple, the Čížeks, decide to hide a Jewish refugee, David Wiener, the son of Čížek's former employer, in the secret pantry of their apartment. Čížek is aware of the danger into which he has brought his household and his neighbours, but he takes helping his fellow man in need for granted. But at the same time, as a largely unheroic hero, he is dying of fear. His personal situation is greatly complicated by the approaching end of the war, when he faces danger from both the Germans and his "honest" fellow Czechs...

In 1944 Poland, a Jewish shop keeper named Jakob is summoned to ghetto headquarters after being caught out after curfew. While waiting for the German Kommondant, Jakob overhears a German radio broadcast about Russian troop movements. Returned to the ghetto, the shopkeeper shares his information with a friend and then rumors fly that there is a secret radio within the ghetto.

The little swift Manou grows up believing he's a seagull. Learning to fly he finds out he never will be. Shocked, he runs away from home. He meets birds of his own species and finds out who he really is. When both seagulls and swifts face a dangerous threat, Manou becomes the hero of the day.

A 17-year-old girl uses her wits, survival skills, and compassion to fight for her life, and those of her fellow classmates, against a group of live-streaming school shooters.

While subjected to the horrors of WWII Germany, young Liesel finds solace by stealing books and sharing them with others. Under the stairs in her home, a Jewish refugee is being sheltered by her adoptive parents.

Occupied France; Lebrac leads a play war between two rival kid gangs, but a girl he likes, who's Jewish, is in danger of being discovered by local Nazi sympathisers. Lebrac and the village must now respond to the reality of what's happening.

Concentration camp survivor Victoria Kowelska finds herself involved in mystery, greed, and murder when she assumes the identity of a dead friend in order to gain passage to America.

This is the true story of Freddy and Walter – two young Slovak Jews, who were deported to Auschwitz in 1942. On 10 April 1944, after meticulous planning, they manage to escape. While the inmates they had left behind courageously stand their ground against the Nazi officers, the two men are driven on by the hope that their evidence could save lives.

Once upon a time, a poor woodcutter and his wife lived in a great forest. Cold, hunger, poverty, and a war raging all around them meant their lives were very hard. One day, the woodcutter's wife rescues a baby. A baby girl thrown from one of the many trains that constantly pass through the forest. This baby, this "most precious of cargoes", will transform the lives of the poor woodcutter's wife and her husband, as well as those whose paths the child will cross—including the man who threw her from the train. And some will try to protect her, whatever the cost. Their story will reveal the worst and the best in the hearts of men.

A family of Irish immigrants adjusts to life on the mean streets of Hell's Kitchen while also grieving the death of a child.

In 1941, the inhabitants of a small Jewish village in Central Europe organize a fake deportation train so that they can escape the Nazis and flee to Palestine.

A drama centered on an orphaned Palestinian girl growing up in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war who finds herself drawn into the conflict.

A lonely boy discovers a mysterious egg that hatches a sea creature of Scottish legend.

Summer 1968. 14-year-old Wolfgang is deported from his family in the secluded Church Welfare Institution sanctuary. One thing is clear for Wolfgang: His yearning for freedom, he will not soon buried in the bog.

In 2015, thirty year old refugee Francis, the sole survivor of a boat that illegally crossed the Mediterranean, is drawn into Berlin's seedy underbelly.

Jamie Graham, a privileged English boy, is living in Shanghai when the Japanese invade and force all foreigners into prison camps. Jamie is captured with an American sailor, who looks out for him while they are in the camp together. Even though he is separated from his parents and in a hostile environment, Jamie maintains his dignity and youthful spirit, providing a beacon of hope for the others held captive with him.

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.

When in 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, their troops quickly besieged Leningrad. Foreign journalists are evacuated but one of them, Kate Davies, is presumed dead and misses the plane. Alone in the city she is helped by Nina Tsvetnova a young and idealist police officer and together they will fight for their own survival and the survival of the people in the besieged Leningrad.

Following a plane crash a group of schoolboys find themselves on a deserted island. They appoint a leader and attempt to create an organized society for the sake of their survival. Democracy and order soon begin to crumble when a breakaway faction regresses to savagery with horrifying consequences.

Although to the outside world he seems like the a perfectly normal insurance broker, Michael secretly keeps a 10-year-old boy, Wolfgang locked in a room in his soundproof basement.

In the closing days of WWII, a Japanese soldier afflicted with tuberculosis is abandoned by his company and left to wander the Philippine island of Leyte.

After a prank makes Joey Norton believe he killed his older brother, he runs away from home and spends the day at Coney Island while his brother tries to find him before their mother gets home.

A man searches for his childhood best friend, a Polish violin prodigy orphaned in the Holocaust, who vanished decades before on the night of his first public performance.

A boy is left alone in a Jewish neighborhood in the year of 1970, where both world cup and dictatorship happen in Brazil.

After being abandoned by their Nazi parents at the end of World War II, five German siblings embark on a harrowing journey across their war-torn country. Led by the eldest, 14 year-old Lore, the children are forced to confront their parents’ actions and the reality of a new world.

Follow the perilous journey to freedom when a young boy and his dog attempt to escape a concentration camp during World War II. Based on true events.

The story of mime Marcel Marceau as he works with a group of Jewish boy scouts and the French Resistance to save the lives of ten thousand orphans during World War II.

One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows-Primo Levi. The Oscar®-winning Helen Mirren will introduce audiences to Anne Frank's story through the words in her diary. The set will be her room in the secret refuge in Amsterdam, reconstructed in every detail by set designers from the Piccolo Theatre in Milan. Anne Frank this year would have been 90 years old. Anne's story is intertwined with that of five Holocaust survivors, teenage girls just like her, with the same ideals, the same desire to live: Arianna Szörenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci. Their testimonies alternate with those of their children and grandchildren.

In the final months of World War II, 14-year-old Seita and his sister Setsuko are orphaned when their mother is killed during an air raid in Kobe, Japan. After a falling out with their aunt, they move into an abandoned bomb shelter. With no surviving relatives and their emergency rations depleted, Seita and Setsuko struggle to survive.

In a small Tokyo apartment, twelve-year-old Akira must care for his younger siblings after their mother leaves them and shows no sign of returning.

A mother bird tries to teach her little one how to find food by herself. In the process, she encounters a traumatic experience that she must overcome in order to survive.

A young man recalls his childhood growing up in a poor alley in Beijing during the 1950s and 1960s.

Hisako loses her home in Tokyo to Allied bombing. With her husband fighting somewhere in Asia, she and her two children evacuate to a suburb of Kobe, where they share a house with Hisako's cousin, Kyoko. Kobe is bombed and Kyoko is killed. Hisako is forced to take care of Kyoko's two children in addition to her own, but there is not enough food for everyone.

In the Jewish tradition of arguing with God, Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz decide to put God on Trial.

A middle-aged man recalls his childhood growing up in and around London during World War II.

The story of the pioneering project to rehabilitate child survivors of the Holocaust on the shores of Lake Windermere.

A young mouse named Fievel and his family decide to migrate to America, a "land without cats," at the turn of the 20th century. But somehow, Fievel ends up in the New World alone and must fend off not only the felines he never thought he'd have to deal with again but also the loneliness of being away from home.

Harry Haft is a boxer who fought fellow prisoners in the concentration camps to survive. Haunted by the memories and his guilt, he attempts to use high-profile fights against boxing legends like Rocky Marciano as a way to find his first love again.

About young British journalist, George Hogg, who with the assistance of a courageous Australian nurse, saves a group of orphaned children during the Japanese occupation of China in 1937.

After being shipwrecked, the Robinson family is marooned on an island inhabited only by an impressive array of wildlife. In true pioneer spirit, they quickly make themselves at home but soon face a danger even greater than nature: dastardly pirates.
