Movies like Palestine: Story of a Land (1993)
The best movies like Palestine: Story of a Land (1993) are Shoah (1985), Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019) and The Untold History Of The United States (2012). If Palestine: Story of a Land hooked you with its documentary and history, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedShoah (1985)8.2/10 from 228 votes
- NewestS4: The Bob Lazar Story (2026)Released 2026
- In FrenchShoah (1985)Also in French
Shoah (1985)
Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisMaking Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)
The history of cinematic sound, told by legendary sound designers and visionary filmmakers.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Untold History Of The United States (2012)
Oliver Stone charts the history of the United States from the Second World War to the present.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisThe Unknown Known (2013)
Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discusses his career in Washington D.C. from his days as a congressman in the early 1960s to planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisVisions of Light (1992)
Cameramen and women discuss the craft and art of cinematography and of the "DP" (the director of photography), illustrating their points with clips from 100 films, from Birth of a Nation to Do the Right Thing. Themes: the DP tells people where to look; changes in movies (the arrival of sound, color, and wide screens) required creative responses from DPs; and, these artisans constantly invent new equipment and try new things, with wonderful results. The narration takes us through the identifiable studio styles of the 30s, the emergence of noir, the New York look, and the impact of Europeans. Citizen Kane, The Conformist, and Gordon Willis get special attention.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Worth the HypeMovies like thisApollo: Missions to the Moon (2019)
National Geographic's riveting effort recounts all 12 crewed missions using only archival footage, photos and audio.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLumière! (2016)
A collection of restored prints from the Lumière Brothers.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Age of Stupid (2009)
Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisTitanic: 20 Years Later with James Cameron (2017)
For the 20th anniversary of "Titanic," James Cameron reopens the file on the disaster.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Soviet Story (2008)
“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now...
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe War Room (1993)
A behind-the-scenes documentary about the Clinton for President campaign, focusing on the adventures of spin doctors James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary & history
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFuck (2006)
A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisFive Broken Cameras (2011)
Five broken cameras – and each one has a powerful tale to tell. Embedded in the bullet-ridden remains of digital technology is the story of Emad Burnat, a farmer from the Palestinian village of Bil’in, which famously chose nonviolent resistance when the Israeli army encroached upon its land to make room for Jewish colonists. Emad buys his first camera in 2005 to document the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. Over the course of the film, he becomes the peaceful archivist of an escalating struggle as olive trees are bulldozed, lives are lost, and a wall is built to segregate burgeoning Israeli settlements.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisDahomey (2024)
Thousands of royal artifacts of Dahomey, a West African kingdom, were taken by French colonists in the 19th century for collection and display in Paris. Centuries later, a fraction returned to their home in modern-day Benin. This dramatized documentary follows the journey of 26 of the treasures as told by cultural art historians, embattled university students, and one of the repatriated statues himself.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisDaguerréotypes (1978)
An intimate portrait of the small shops and shopkeepers of the Rue Daguerre in Paris, a picturesque street that has been the filmmaker’s home for more than 50 years.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisAs I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Skywalker Legacy (2020)
The story lives forever in this feature-length documentary that charts the making of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisS4: The Bob Lazar Story (2026)
Over 35 years after Bob Lazar's revelations, this documentary exposes secrets of a facility the government still denies. Featuring Lazar's testimony, recreations, and new evidence, it reopens a case that continues to spark global curiosity
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisNight Will Fall (2014)
When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisCome See Me in the Good Light (2025)
In an intimate and joyful story of love in the face of loss, celebrated poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley find strength—and unexpected hilarity—in what might be their final year together.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both documentary
Worth the HypeMovies like thisHere and Elsewhere (1976)
Here and Elsewhere takes its name from the contrasting footage it shows of the fedayeen and of a French family watching television at home. Originally shot by the Dziga Vertov Group as a film on Palestinian freedom fighters, Godard later reworked the material alongside Anne-Marie Miéville.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Staatsräson (2026)
Building on testimony from pro-Palestinian activists in Berlin and featuring demonstration footage from between 2023 and 2025, this animated documentary explores activist culture and the people who have spent the past 2 years clashing with German police. By applying an expressive and colourful brush stroke to the experiences and anecdotes of two people closely involved with the movement, we look into the motivations that have driven them to get involved and their reactions to the repression they have experienced. Staatsraison attempts to shine light on police violence and explore how repression can drive someone ever further into a political movement.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Epicly Palestine'd: The Birth of Skateboarding in the West Bank (2015)
The story of how a small group of teenagers created a skate scene from scratch in a place where you can't even buy a skateboard, whilst facing the challenges of living under military occupation.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
500 Dunam on the Moon (2002)
Ayn Hawd is a Palestinian village that was captured and depopulated by Israeli forces in the 1948 war. In 1953 Marcel Janco, a Romanian painter and a founder of the Dada movement, helped transform the village into a Jewish artists' colony, and renamed it Ein Hod. This documentary tells the story of the village's original inhabitants, who, after expulsion, settled only 1.5 kilometers away in the outlying hills. This new Ayn Hawd cannot be found on official maps, as Israeli law doesn't recognize it, and its residents, deemed "present absentees" by the authorities, do not receive basic services such as water, electricity or an access road. Rachel Leah Jones' filmmaking debut is a critical look at the art of dispossession and the creativity of the dispossessed.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Fertile Memory (1981)
A portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the politics that have torn apart their homes and their lives. Farah Hatoum, a widow living with her children and grandchildren, and Sahar Khalifeh, a novelist from the West Bank.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
One Dollar a Day (2016)
Poetry is everywhere, even in the refugee camps where absolute misery reigns. In front of old plastic advertising posters on which are drawn in giant format the big icons of luxury and consumerism that make up their shelters, refugee children stand like kings. Symbols of life at the heart of war, fragility, and death, these children are shown by Jocelyne Saab as precious notes of hope in the heart of a dehumanized world. One Dollar a Day was filmed in the Syrian refugee camps of the Bekaa plain, Lebanon in 2015, with text by Etel Adnan.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Detained (2001)
Najwa, Nawal, and Siham, three Palestinian widows, live with their 11 children in a house on Shuhada Street in Hebron. Their house lies on the border; the façade is under Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority controls the back. At the entrance to the house is a military post; on the roof the Israeli army has placed a watch point over Palestinian Hebron. The three women, trapped in the middle and constantly surrounded by Israeli soldiers, carry on their difficult lives in a perverse situation: the occupation becomes a routine, the absurd becomes a given. This is the story of an occupation that extends to the staircase and the roof of the house, where it encounters poverty, loneliness, pain, but also the small joys of everyday life. This is an internal prison, the external one is the ongoing occupation.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
The Good Soldier (2021)
A look inside the work of Breaking the Silence, an organization of former IDF combat soldiers who collect and publish testimonies of soldiers who served in the occupied territories. For six months, director Silvina Landsmann, camera in hand, accompanied the staff of the organization. The many hours of footage have been refined into a film that dives into the heart of Breaking the Silence’s work: guided tours of Hebron and the surrounding area, public lectures and house meetings, internal staff meetings and media strategy. All the while the organization is forced to justify its very existence, both internally and to the broader public, and to justify its place in the political debate. The Good Soldier raises questions about Israel’s dynamic mainstream and the challenges of confronting it.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Holy Land: Startup Nations (2017)
With the most tech startups and venture capital per capita in the world, Israel has long been hailed as The Startup Nation. WIRED’s feature-length documentary looks beyond Tel Aviv’s vibrant, liberal tech epicenter to the wider Holy Land region – the Palestinian territories, where a parallel Startup Nation story is emerging in East Jerusalem, Nazareth, Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank, as well as in the Israeli cybersecurity hub of Be’er Sheva. And we will learn how the fertile innovation ecosystem of Silicon Wadi has evolved as a result of its unique political, geographical and cultural situation and explore the future challenges – and solutions – these nations are facing.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
Tawfiq’s Reef (2016)
Tawfiq’s Reef chronicles the plight of Palestinian fishermen in Gaza, heavily restricted in the area in which they can fish, often indebted, shot at, harassed or imprisoned by the Israeli Navy on the narrow sliver of fishing waters available to them off the Gaza coastline, making this one of the most dangerous professions in the world.
Why it matches: Similar story and style · both documentary
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Palestine: Story of a Land?
The closest matches to Palestine: Story of a Land are Shoah (1985), Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019) and The Untold History Of The United States (2012). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Palestine: Story of a Land?
Start with Shoah (1985), the closest match to Palestine: Story of a Land.
What is the highest-rated movie like Palestine: Story of a Land?
Shoah (1985), rated 8.2/10 by 228 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Palestine: Story of a Land?
S4: The Bob Lazar Story (2026) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there French movies like Palestine: Story of a Land?
Yes: Shoah (1985), Lumière! (2016) and Dahomey (2024).
How are movies similar to Palestine: Story of a Land chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Palestine: Story of a Land, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.