Six sliders. No stars.
Nothing on this site is recommended because people liked it. Films are described by what they are (how heavy, how fast, how far from the real world), and you get the ones closest to what you asked for.
Neither of these is the better film. They are just at opposite ends.
61 films tagged poverty, showing 50
Move a slider to sort by what films are like.
2025 · Comedy
A guardian angel tries to show a broke gig worker that money is not the answer by swapping his life with his rich boss's, and it costs him his wings. Easygoing comedy, with the fantasy kept small.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
Two childhood friends in a north Indian village, one Muslim and one Dalit, study for the police exam because the uniform would finally get them some respect. It moves slowly and stays close to the two of them.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Crime
Two childhood sweethearts in a cannabis-growing region start making a stronger liquid form of the drug and selling it around the brothers who run the trade. The money comes fast, and so do the brothers.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
A successful photographer gives it up to write novels and finds that good reviews do not pay rent. He takes gig app jobs one after another, judged each time by a rating everyone can see.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Crime
Three young men in Japan make a living pretending to be women online, talking men into selling them their identity papers. It follows the three of them as the work pulls them further in.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
After her father dies, a ten-year-old girl and her mother are left with almost nothing, and she takes refuge in the theatre. Short, at 82 minutes, and told from the girl's side.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
A woman returns from her mother's funeral to find her Caracas flat seized by an armed militia, in a city of protests, shortages and officials on the take. Tense, and it stays close to her.
AI estimate, not yet described
2025 · Science fiction
In a near-future America run by a television network, a blacklisted worker joins the show where runners are hunted for thirty days and have to film themselves daily. It moves at a sprint from there.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Crime
A woman working every job she can get in Portland has one night to replace the $25,000 she had saved to buy the house she shares with her mother and brother. One night, and it gets uglier as it goes.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Crime
A single mother with a sick daughter has until ten in the morning to find the rent, and every hour of the day makes it worse. It stays on her through one long stretch until she is out of options.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
A single mother moves to Taipei with her two daughters and opens a noodle stand at a night market, while the older girl works across the way and old debts catch up with them. It stays in the market and with the three of them.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Comedy
Two friends in Los Angeles find their rent money gone and have until six in the evening to come up with $1,500 or lose the apartment. One long day, one bad idea after another, played for laughs.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
In sanctions-era Iraq a nine-year-old is picked at school to bake the cake for Saddam Hussein's birthday, and flour and eggs are nowhere to be found. She sets off for the city with her grandmother to trade for them.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
A homeless young man in London, in and out of trouble and struggling with addiction, comes out of prison and tries to put a life together with a social worker's help. It stays right with him, and slips now and then into something stranger.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Science fiction
A fishing boat lost at sea thirty years ago sails back into the harbour of a declining Cornish village, and two men who need the money sign on to crew her. Slow and strange, with the village's old loss over all of it.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
A homeless woman in Seattle is handed a bill for $21,634 to get back the car she had been living out of, and sets about fighting the tow company for it. It is one person against an office, and the car is everything she has.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
A widowed father wakes his two young children before dawn, tells them they are going on a road trip, and drives across the country without saying where to. Small and quiet, mostly the three of them in a car.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Drama
Five teenage mothers live with their children in a shelter in Belgium, all of them poor and all of them working out what comes next. It moves between the five of them and stays plain and close.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Comedy
A bailiff in Cluj evicts a homeless man from a basement and he kills himself, which happens early and leaves her going around the city trying to work out what she owes him. It is played as black comedy, and the guilt sets in straight away.
AI estimate, not yet described
2016 · Drama
Three chapters in the life of a quiet boy growing up in Miami: as a child, as a teenager, and as a grown man. Each one turns on who he is willing to be seen as.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2018 · Drama
A twelve-year-old boy living rough in Beirut takes his parents to court for having him. Most of it follows him around the city day to day, shot hand-held with people who had not acted before.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Drama
A sports official traces a town's love of athletics back to one man, and the story goes back to 1994 and a tribal village with no name on any map. Peddi plays cricket for wages, and the landlords nearby do not like it.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Horror
Two women scrape a living at the edge of a medieval wood, waiting for the husband and son who went off to the Wars of the Roses. When his friend comes back alone with a story about how he died, it starts to come between them.
AI estimate, not yet described
2002 · Crime
Two boys grow up in a Rio housing project through the sixties and seventies, one drifting toward photography and the other toward the drug trade. It moves fast and jumps between dozens of lives.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Crime
In a near-future Korean city run by gangsters, the people society has given up on gather at a place called Texas Hot Springs, and a new arrival named Jane upsets the order of it. Bleak and stylised.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2026 · Drama
In a drought-hit village where farmers are buried in debt, a devout man locks up the temple in protest while his sceptical wife starts seeing the god he gave up on. Three hours, arguing about faith.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2025 · Crime
An industrial diver and his sister, who researches the seabed, are both badly short of money when they find cocaine hidden in a freighter's hull in a Spanish port. The work and the debts come first.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2022 · Crime
A woman buried in student debt takes a cash job that turns out to be buying goods with stolen credit cards. It moves fast, stays right beside her, and keeps raising what she has to risk.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2023 · Comedy
Two lonely people in Helsinki, both scraping by on bad jobs, meet at a karaoke bar and keep losing track of each other. Short, very quiet, deadpan, and in Finnish.
AI estimate, not yet described
2016 · Crime
Two brothers rob small branches of one particular Texas bank, with a Ranger weeks from retirement working out where they will hit next. Wide empty roads, dry jokes, and a lot of waiting.
AI estimate, not yet described
2008 · Action
A quiet martial arts master in 1930s Foshan avoids fighting until the Japanese occupation leaves him nowhere to stand. Fights every ten minutes, and the rest is his household getting poorer.
AI estimate, not yet described
2001 · Musical
A village in colonial India can skip three years of tax if it beats the British garrison at cricket, a game none of them has played. Nearly four hours, with songs, and the last hour is the match.
AI estimate, not yet described
2019 · Thriller
A family with no money talk their way one by one into jobs with a rich household on the other side of the city. The first half plays as a con, and they are good at it.
AI estimate, not yet described
2004 · Drama
A waitress past thirty talks a stubborn old trainer into taking her on, and turns out to be worth the trouble. Slow and quiet, and almost all of it is three people around one gym.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2020 · Drama
A seventeen-year-old from small-town Pennsylvania takes the bus to New York with her cousin to get an abortion she cannot get at home. Very little talking, and a great deal of waiting around.
AI estimate, not yet described
2020 · Drama
After her town in Nevada empties out, a woman in her sixties packs her life into a van and takes seasonal work across the American west. Not much plot, real people playing themselves, a lot of sky.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2018 · Drama
A family in Tokyo living off part-time work and small thefts takes in a little girl they find alone in the cold. It is quiet and slow, and most of it is the six of them crowded into a tiny house.
AI estimate, not yet described
2008 · Drama
A teenager from the Mumbai slums is one question from winning the country's biggest game show, and the police want to know how a boy like him has the answers. His whole life, out of order and fast.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2019 · Comedy
A young man tells the story of his own life, from a bottle factory in London to a boat house on the coast and a run of people he cannot get out of his head. It jumps between times and places quickly, with a huge cast and a lot of jokes.
AI estimate, not yet described
2019 · Animation
A runaway teenager arrives in a Tokyo where the rain never stops and meets a girl who can clear the sky for a few hours at a time. Bright animation, pop songs, and a great deal of weather.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2007 · Drama
Two students in communist Romania spend one day arranging an illegal abortion in a rented hotel room. Long unbroken takes, and the tension never lets up.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2019 · Drama
In a Dakar suburb a girl promised to a rich man loves a builder who leaves by sea for Spain, and then strange things start happening at night. Half romance and half something else.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2012 · Drama
A six-year-old in a flooded Louisiana bayou community holds things together as her father gets sicker and the water rises. Told from her height, with her imagination left in it.
AI estimate, not yet described
2000 · Drama
During the miners' strike a County Durham boy swaps his boxing lessons for the ballet class in the same hall, and hides it from his father. Funny and hard by turns.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2024 · Drama
A twelve-year-old in a Kent squat, ignored by her father and frightened of her mother's boyfriend, meets a strange man looking for his family. Rough and handheld, with something odd running through it.
AI estimate, not yet described
1988 · Animation
A teenage boy and his little sister are left on their own in Japan in the last months of the war and try to live in an abandoned shelter. Animated, and it does not soften any of it.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2019 · Documentary
The last wild beekeeper in a deserted Macedonian village looks after her blind mother, until a family with cattle moves in next door. Filmed over three years with no narration.
AI estimate, not yet described
2012 · Musical
A paroled convict in nineteenth-century France breaks parole to raise another man's daughter, with a policeman after him for twenty years. Sung almost the whole way through.
AI estimate, not yet described
2017 · Crime
Two West Virginia brothers plan to rob a NASCAR speedway during a race, with help from a safecracker who is still in prison. Relaxed and funny, with a real plan in it.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2014 · Drama
A widow takes her violent teenage son home from an institution, and the neighbour across the road starts helping. Shot in a square frame, and very loud.
AI estimate, not yet described