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11 Movies to Fuel Your Wanderlust

1. Amélie is a story about a girl named Amélie whose childhood was suppressed by her Father’s mistaken concerns of a heart defect. With these concerns Amélie gets hardly any real life contact with other people. This leads Amélie to resort to her own fantastical world and dreams of love and beauty.

She later on becomes a young woman and moves to the central part of Paris as a waitress. After finding a lost treasure belonging to the former occupant of her apartment, she decides to return it to him. After seeing his reaction and his new found perspective - she decides to devote her life to the people around her. Such as, her father who is obsessed with his garden-gnome, a failed writer, a hypochondriac, a man who stalks his ex girlfriends, the “ghost”, a suppressed young soul, the love of her life and a man whose bones are as brittle as glass.
Makes you want to: Go to Paris, send mysterious post cards, play pranks.

2. Moulin Rouge
The year is 1899, and Christian, a young English writer, has come to Paris to follow the Bohemian revolution taking hold of the city’s drug and prostitute infested underworld. And nowhere is the thrill of the underworld more alive than at the Moulin Rouge, a night club where the rich and poor men alike come to be entertained by the dancers, but things take a wicked turn for Christian as he starts a deadly love affair with the star courtesan of the club, Satine. But her affections are also coveted by the club’s patron: the Duke. A dangerous love triangle ensues as Satine and Christian attempt to fight all odds to stay together but a force that not even love can conquer is taking its toll on Satine…

Makes you want to: Cry, go to Paris, learn to dance, drink absinthe


 

3. Lost In Translation
Bob Harris is an American film actor, far past his prime. He visits Tokyo to appear in commercials, and he meets Charlotte, the young wife of a visiting photographer. Bored and weary, Bob and Charlotte make ideal if improbable traveling companions. Charlotte is looking for “her place in life,” and Bob is tolerating a mediocre stateside marriage. Both separately and together, they live the experience of the American in Tokyo. Bob and Charlotte suffer both confusion and hilarity due to the cultural and language differences between themselves and the Japanese. As the relationship between Bob and Charlotte deepens, they come to the realization that their visits to Japan, and one another, must soon end. Or must they? 

Makes you want to: Go to Japan, sing karaoke, stay at a fancy hotel.

 
4. Eat, Pray Love
Liz Gilbert (Roberts) had everything a modern woman is supposed to dream of having - a husband, a house, a successful career - yet like so many others, she found herself lost, confused, and searching for what she really wanted in life.

Newly divorced and at a crossroads, Gilbert steps out of her comfort zone, risking everything to change her life, embarking on a journey around the world that becomes a quest for self-discovery.

In her travels, she discovers the true pleasure of nourishment by eating in Italy; the power of prayer in India, and, finally and unexpectedly, the inner peace and balance of true love in Bali. 

Makes you want to: Quit your job, start to meditate, go to Bali, learn Italian. 

5. The Darjeeling Limited
A year after the accidental death of their father, three drug-addicted brothers — each suffering from depression - meet for a train trip across India.

Francis, the eldest, has organized it. The brothers argue, sulk, resent each other, and fight. The youngest, Jack, estranged from his girlfriend, is attracted to one of the train’s attendants. Peter has left his pregnant wife at home, and he buys a venomous snake. After a few days, Francis discloses their surprising and disconcerting destination.

Amid foreign surroundings, can the brothers sort out their differences? A funeral, a meditation, a hilltop ritual, and the Bengal Lancer figure in the reconciliation.

Makes you want to: Take the train, go to India, drink tea. 

6. L’Auberge Espagnole
As part of a job that he is promised, Xavier, an economics student in his twenties, signs on to a European exchange program in order to gain working knowledge of the Spanish language. Promising that they’ll remain close, he says farewell to his loving girlfriend, then heads to Barcelona. Following his arrival, Xavier is soon thrust into a cultural melting pot when he moves into an apartment full of international students. An Italian, an English girl, a boy from Denmark, a young girl from Belgium, a German and a girl from Tarragona all join him in a series of adventures that serve as an initiation to life. 

Makes you want to: Learn Spanish, move to Barcelona, get new friends

7. In Bruges
2 Irish hitmen are told by their boss Harry to lay low in Bruges, Belgium following their latest job and the death of an innocent bystander.  Ken follows Harry’s advice and takes in the sights of the medieval city.  The charm of Bruges is lost on Ray, who is despondent about how his first job went tragically wrong, although things change when me meets Chloe, part of a film crew shooting a movie starring an American dwarf.

Musing on life and death in picture-postcard beautiful Bruges, Ken can’t carry out his next job from Harry, and awaits Harry’s angry arrival to clean things up.  Ray is dealing with his own problems - Ken, Harry, Chloe, a Canadian couple and a half-blind thief, and is trying to carve out a new life.  Amidst all the change in this fairytale city, Harry tries to keep to his principles.

Makes you want to: Eat at cafes on the Grote Markt central square, take a boat ride on the canals, and walk the cobbled streets eating chocolates to see if they are filming midgets.

8. The Endless Summer
They call it The Endless Summer the ultimate surfing adventure, crossing the glob in search of the perfect wave. From the uncharted waters of West Africa, to the shark-filled seas of Australia, to the tropical paradise of Tahiti and beyond, these California surfers accomplish in a few months what most people never do in a lifetime… They live their dream.

Makes you want to: Surf, live your dream

9. The Motorcycle Diaries
In 1952, twenty-three year old medical student Ernesto Guevara de la Serna - Fuser to his friends and later better known as ‘Ernesto Che Guevara’ - one semester away from graduation, decides to postpone his last semester to accompany his twenty-nine year old biochemist friend ‘Alberto Granado’ - Mial to his friends - on his four month, 8,000 km long dream motorcycle trip throughout South America starting from their home in Buenos Aires.

Their quest is to see things they’ve only read about in books about the continent on which they live, and to finish that quest on Alberto’s thirtieth birthday on the other side of the continent in the Guajira Peninsula in Venezuela. Not all on this trip goes according to their rough plan due to a broken down motorbike and a continual lack of money.

Makes you want to: Read books, go to Argentina, go on a motorbike trip 

10. Midnight in Paris
Gil and Inez travel to Paris as a tag-along vacation on her parents’ business trip. Gil is a successful Hollywood writer but is struggling on his first novel. He falls in love with the city and thinks they should move there after they get married, but Inez does not share his romantic notions of the city or the idea that the 1920s was the golden age.

When Inez goes off dancing with her friends, Gil takes a walk at midnight and discovers what could be the ultimate source of inspiration for writing. Gil’s daily walks at midnight in Paris could take him closer to the heart of the city but further from the woman he’s about to marry.

 Makes you want to: Visit Paris, go back to the 1920s. 

11. Into the Wild
Based on a true story. After graduating from Emory University, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters who shape his life. 

Makes you want to: Go camping, go to Alaska, take a Cliff bar with you wherever you go