

Ellen Foster(1997)
After her mother's death, a young girl is separated from her abusive father and is sent between her various friends and relatives, always longing to find a place to call home.

Movie: Ellen Foster
Recommendations Movies
7.3Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story(en)
Based on a true story. Liz Murray is a young girl who is taken care of by her loving, but drug-addicted parents. Liz becomes homeless at 15 and after a tragedy comes upon her, she begins her work to finish high school.
6.0Sleepwalking(en)
When her boyfriend is arrested for marijuana possession, Joleen Reedy and her 11-year-old daughter, Tara, take refuge with Joleen's aimless brother, James. Joleen soon runs off with a truck driver, and James is unable to meet his responsibilities. After Child Protective Services takes possession of Tara, James abducts her from a foster home, and the two travel from California to Utah, where his abusive father lives.
6.6The Burning Plain(en)
A trailer is burning in the middle of a plain. The bodies of two adulterous lovers are found. Scenes from both families, before and after the dramatic events, suggest an unusual connection between them. But what is their secret?
6.1Mammal(en)
After Margaret, a divorcée living in Dublin, loses her teenage son, she develops an unorthodox relationship with Joe, a homeless youth. Their tentative trust is threatened by his involvement with a violent gang and the escalation of her ex-husband's grieving rage.
5.9The Witch Who Came from the Sea(en)
Anger stemming from being abused as a child drives an alcoholic's daughter to kill as an adult.
6.6Gimme Shelter(en)
After running away from her abusive mother, a streetwise teen seeks refuge with her father, but he rejects her when he learns that she's pregnant.
6.1American Son(en)
Time passes and tension mounts in a Florida police station as an estranged interracial couple awaits news of their missing teenage son.
7.1What Maisie Knew(en)
In New York City, a young girl is caught in the middle of her parents' bitter custody battle.
7.3An American Crime(en)
The true story of suburban housewife Gertrude Baniszewski, who kept a teenage girl locked in the basement of her Indiana home during the 1960s.
6.2Gardens of the Night(en)
After being abducted as children, and suffering years of abuse, a teenage boy and girl find themselves living on the street.
6.0Ken Park(en)
Teen skater Ken Park (nicknamed Krap Nek; his name spelled and pronounced backward) kills himself at a Visalia skate park; his death bookends the lives of four other young people who knew him: Shawn, the most conventional; Tate brims with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother; and Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.
6.0Georgia Rule(en)
Rebellious, uncontrollable teenager, Rachel is hauled off by her dysfunctional mother to spend the summer with her estranged grandmother, Georgia. Her journey will lead all three women to revelations of buried family secrets and an understanding that - regardless what happens - the ties that bind can never be broken.
5.8Come Sunday(en)
Evangelist Carlton Pearson is ostracized by his church for preaching that there is no Hell.
6.9Untamed Heart(en)
Caroline, a young waitress who seems to have bad taste in men, is on her way home one night when thugs attempt to rape her. Adam, the mysterious busboy who works at the same diner, helps fight off the assailants, and she begins a relationship with him -- but not all their fellow Minnesotans are happy for them. Meanwhile, the couple face their own difficulties when Caroline finds about Adam's past, including his unique health condition.
7.4Stuart: A Life Backwards(en)
Story about the remarkable friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator and a chaotic homeless man, whom he gets to know during a campaign to release two charity workers from prison.
5.9Trishna(en)
When her father is killed in a road accident, Trishna's family expect her to provide for them. The rich son of an entrepreneur starts to restlessly pursue her affections, but are his intentions as pure as they seem?
7.1Kisses(en)
Two kids, Dylan and Kylie, run away from home on Christmas Day and spend a night of magic and terror on the streets of inner-city Dublin.
6.1Hello Sister, Goodbye Life(en)
A college student must take care of her 7-year-old half sister after the death of their parents.
6.3Cardboard Boxer(en)
Gentle and broken, a homeless man fights others on video for money but soon finds comfort in an unlikely friend and the lost diary of a young girl.
6.5Starving in Suburbia(en)
When seventeen-year-old Hannah stumbles upon a website about Thinspiration--an online community devoted to anorexia as a life choice--she becomes an obsessive follower of the site founder, ButterflyAna. By the time Hannah's family realizes what is happening and get Hannah the help she needs, the disease has fully taken hold and Hannah is refusing to eat. Will this family be able to exorcise the demon of anorexia from their lives?
Similar Movies
7.7The Color Purple(en)
An epic tale spanning forty years in the life of Celie, an African-American woman living in the South who survives incredible abuse and bigotry. After Celie's abusive father marries her off to the equally debasing 'Mister' Albert Johnson, things go from bad to worse, leaving Celie to find companionship anywhere she can. She perseveres, holding on to her dream of one day being reunited with her sister in Africa.
0.0Far from the South(fr)
Boris is around 20 years old and lives on the road with his disturbed father. When his boss offers him a better job at the restaurant where he works, Boris sees a way out off this rambling life.
7.5Volver(es)
Three generations of women deal with family secrets while surviving the east wind, fire, insanity, superstition, lies and even death.
Last Mountain(en)
A homeless dying veteran, trying to find a Unicorn he believes lives in the mountains above Los Angeles, convinces a Latina immigrant to join his quest, provoking a tragic-comic chase as they are followed by the Border Patrol and her Lowrider cousins.
7.4Distant Lights(de)
Lichter is an episodic tale from Hans-Christian Schmid about the life on the border between Germany and Poland. The film sheds light on the everyday stories of escape and desperateness.
7.4This Man Must Die(fr)
When his young son is killed in a hit and run accident, Charles Thenier resolves to hunt down and murder the killer. By chance, Thenier makes the acquaintance of an actress, Helène Lanson, who was in the car at the time of the accident. He then meets Helène’s brother-in-law, Paul Decourt, a truly horrible individual.
7.2For the Love of a Child(en)
1959, support from US troops based in Asia and later from the Sates enables two actresses to start a charity for mixed-race 'orphans' who are locally neglected as outcasts. Thus originates Childhelp, which later runs multi-disciplinary centers for abused and/or neglected children in the States. Among them is bright Jacob Fletcher, whose stepfather, a lawyer, terrorized him into utter trauma and reclaims him shortly after 10 months in jail. Jacob's peers have distressing stories of their own, but competent, devoted staff helps most of them decisively on the former farm, using animal therapy.
5.6Dark River(en)
After her father dies, a young woman returns to her Yorkshire village for the first time in 15 years to claim the family farm she believes is hers.
7.3Dolores Claiborne(en)
Dolores Claiborne was accused of killing her abusive husband twenty years ago, but the court's findings were inconclusive and she was allowed to walk free. Now she has been accused of killing her employer, Vera Donovan, and this time there is a witness who can place her at the scene of the crime. Things look bad for Dolores when her daughter Selena, a successful Manhattan magazine writer, returns to cover the story.
7.0Dear Frankie(en)
Nine-year-old Frankie and his single mum Lizzie have been on the move ever since Frankie can remember, most recently arriving in a seaside Scottish town. Wanting to protect her deaf son from the truth that they've run away from his father, Lizzie has invented a story that he is away at sea on the HMS Accra. Every few weeks, Lizzie writes Frankie a make-believe letter from his father, telling of his adventures in exotic lands. As Frankie tracks the ship's progress around the globe, he discovers that it is due to dock in his hometown. With the real HMS Accra arriving in only a fortnight, Lizzie must choose between telling Frankie the truth or finding the perfect stranger to play Frankie's father for just one day...
5.8The Echo of Thunder(en)
Scenic settings in Australia enhance this Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation, a simple yet engaging tale about a teenage girl's adjustment to a new family.
0.0Gunyo Cholo: A Girl Coming of Age Story(ne)
Gulabi is a transwoman groomed by her patriarchal father to join the military. When her father disowns her, Gulabi ends up living a life of prostitution in Kathmandu.
6.0Ken Park(en)
Teen skater Ken Park (nicknamed Krap Nek; his name spelled and pronounced backward) kills himself at a Visalia skate park; his death bookends the lives of four other young people who knew him: Shawn, the most conventional; Tate brims with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother; and Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.
7.5Custody(fr)
Miriam and Antoine have recently separated. While she’s willing to permit their 17-year-old daughter Josephine to decide living arrangements for herself, Miriam is desperate to keep her youngest, 11-year-old Julien, away from his father. But the magistrate rules in favour of joint custody, and suddenly the boy is thrown directly into the middle of an escalating parental conflict, where it seems inevitable that sides must be chosen.
6.7Code Unknown(fr)
A series of events unfold like a chain reaction, all stemming from a minor event that brings the film's five characters together. Set in Paris, France, Anne is an actress whose boyfriend Georges photographs the war in Kosovo. Georges' brother, Jean, is looking for the entry code to Georges' apartment. These characters' lives interconnect with a Romanian immigrant and a deaf teacher.
6.0The Scent of Death(en)
The Chemos and the Pachecos are two gangs whose adventures are witnessed by the doctor, the assistant and the social worker of a clinic where they know of the young men's problems.
7.0Phantom(en)
In Tokyo, a girl and her boyfriend spend a night talking about their life, their precarious condition and their difficulties to earn a living, their place in the world, if ever they have one...
0.0Take Everything(en)
Terry is a homeless drifter just trying to get by in a new city. But when his life is threatened, he attempts to escape with the help of Eva, a sex worker also on the run











