Coming of Age (To Watch)

A self-reliable 11-year-old boy runs away from children's home to be with his dysfunctional mother. She doesn't want him back so he starts living on an old barge.

Strange events happen in a small village in the north of Germany during the years before World War I, which seem to be ritual punishment. Who is responsible?

In the 1950s, a young boy living with his troublesome family in rural USA fantasizes that a neighboring widow is actually a vampire, responsible for a number of disappearances in the area.

Everyday coming-of-age issues mirror the political goings on in the days before Franco's 1975 demise.

Two boys in their early adolescence in a strictly-run pre-WWII Catholic school form a firm friendship that is troubled by an abbot who is obsessed with the younger boy.

When his wife dies, Lasse takes his 12-year-old son, Pelle, from their home in Sweden to Denmark in search of a better life.

9 year old Louis spends his summer in Brittany. He stays with Marcelle and her husband Pelo while his mother gives birth to her second baby. Louis becomes friends with Martine, 10 year old girl next door, and learns about life from her.

Neglected 13 year old Aloysha is cast in a cheesecake commercial and becomes obsessed with the idea of having a "perfect family" of his own, at any cost.

The enchanted story of Pinocchio.

When 21-year-old Leo, the oldest of four brothers, announces to his rural French family that he's HIV+ family bonds are tested. The family decides that 11-year-old Marcel, the youngest, is too young to understand, and the family agrees to keep the unsettling news from him. Marcel overhears enough to understand that something amiss with Leo and when the two travel to Paris together, Marcel confronts Leo with what he suspects.

The antisocial son of an alcoholic father and a bipolar mother grows up in 1960s Ireland.

In the Russian wilderness, two brothers face a range of new, conflicting emotions when their father - a man they know only through a single photograph - resurfaces.

With Adolf Hitler threatening Europe, against the backdrop of the deceptively peaceful summer of 1939, 14-year-old Julien experiences the intoxicating effects of first love, smitten with his beautiful 16-year-old cousin Julia.

Brothers Martin and Simon, not yet teens, are incorrigible vandals; Martin runs away from reform school, Simon from foster homes, and they always find each other in a seacoast town of Lignan, where their destructive behavior is infamous. (It may date to their mother's leaving the family.) Martin is philosophical, romantic, and poetic: he dreams of being the son of a shark; he holds tight to a book about goldfish his mother gave him. In both halting and wild ways, he tries to court Marie, a neighbor girl. Simon, with a pocketknife and an intractable will, seems more dangerous to others. What, on earth, is there for these children-becoming-men?

Sharkey, part of the sinister world of child trade, picks up Vlado, an orphan of war, dreaming of freedom and a better life. They embark upon a strange and enlightening journey through war torn Bosnia. As they struggle to get out of the country and fight to stay alive, they find a special love and compassion from which emerges their ultimate moral and spiritual redemption.

During World War II, more than 70,000 Finnish children were evacuated to neutral Sweden to avoid the conflict. From the award-winning Klaus Härö (Elina: As If I Wasn't There (2002)), "Mother of Mine" tackles that painful patch of history in a tale of 9-year-old Eero, a child who increasingly feels abandoned by his biological Finnish mother, yet not attached to his Swedish surrogate mom. When he is returned to Finland, his confusion intensifies.

Growing up together. All emotions pass the review. Friendship and hope survive all.

A series of gruesome accidents plague a small American farming community in the summer of 1935, encircling two identical twin brothers and their family.

Two 12-year-old Chilean children from different social classes become friends in 1973. They both discover each other's world as political tensions in their country increase.

A mom and her 10 year son motor around the country as she makes ends meet by turning tricks until her car breaks down. She then temporarily takes up with a hardware store owner until she gets her own place. Then the kid's father shows up to try to take the two over.

A 12-year-old boy comes of age in 1969 Key West against the backdrop of the Apollo moon landing, when he begins to sell cocaine so his mother can stop stripping.

The emotive journey of a former schoolteacher who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.

The boy Vito is a portrait of beauty and wide-eyed innocence spawned from a violent family of kidnapers and murderers in the South of Italy. When his entire family is murdered by a rival clan of kidnapers, Vito must flee for his own life and in the end attempts to make atonement for some of his family's sins.

A young father and his two children struggle to find harmony after his wife leaves them for another man.

A boy stands on a station platform as a train is about to leave. Should he go with his mother or stay with his father? Infinite possibilities arise from this decision. As long as he doesn't choose, anything is possible.