Best movies & TV Shows like Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day
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A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day Starring Gottfried John, Hanna Schygulla, Luise Ullrich, Werner Finck, and more. If you liked Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day then you may also like: The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz, We Cellar Children, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, Rio das Mortes, Rosemary and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
Commissioned to make a working-class family drama for public television, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the assignment and ran, dodging expectations by depicting social realities in West Germany from a critical—yet far from cynical—perspective. Over the course of five episodes, the sprawling story tracks the everyday triumphs and travails of the young toolmaker Jochen and many of the people populating his world, including the woman he loves, his eccentric family, and his fellow workers, with whom he bands together to improve conditions on the factory floor.
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Rio das Mortes
Michel and Guenther, working in dead-end jobs, are obsessed with going to Peru to find buried treasure, using a map of the Rio das Mortes. Michel's girlfriend, Hanna, humors their plan, but really just wants to get married.
Rosemary
West Germany in '50s is becoming an economic superpower. In such climate, Rosemarie is just one of many enterpreneurs who wants her piece of new fortune. She uses her charms to bring members of West German industrial elite to her bed. There she finds business secrets and later sells them to French competition. However, when scandal errupts, Rosemarie would find that she can't beat the system.
Katzelmacher
A group of young slackers spend most of their time hanging out in front of a Munich apartment building. When a Greek immigrant named Jorgos moves in, however, their aimless lives are shaken up. Soon new tensions arise both within the group and with Jorgos.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
Emmi Kurowski, a cleaning lady, is lonely in her old age. Her husband died years ago, and her grown children offer little companionship. One night she goes to a bar frequented by Arab immigrants and strikes up a friendship with middle-aged mechanic Ali. Their relationship soon develops into something more, and Emmi's family and neighbors criticize their spontaneous marriage. Soon Emmi and Ali are forced to confront their own insecurities about their future.
American Dream
When workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota are asked to take a substantial pay cut in a highly profitable year, the local labor union decides to go on strike and fight for a wage they believe is fair. But as the work stoppage drags on and the strikers face losing everything, friends become enemies, families are divided and the very future of this typical mid American town is threatened.
Beware of a Holy Whore
Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer -- arrogant, caustic, and self-satisfied. She mistreats Marlene (her secretary, maid, and co-designer). Enter Karin, a 23-year-old beauty who wants to be a model. Petra falls in love with Karin and invites her to move in.
Blue Collar
Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.
Fox and His Friends
Fox, a former circus performer, wins the lottery of DM 500,000 and can now have the life and things that he has always wanted. While he wants to climb up the social ladder, it isn't without turmoil, and being torn between his old working class roots, and the shiny new facade of middle class consciousness.
Germany in Autumn
Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.
The Marriage of Maria Braun
Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.
Love Is Colder Than Death
Small-time pimp Franz is torn between his mistress and Bruno, the gangster sent after him by a shady crime syndicate he's refused to join.
The Miracle of Bern
The movie deals with the championship-winning German soccer team of 1954. Its story is linked with two others: The family of a young boy is split due to the events in World War II, and the father returns from Russia after eleven years. The second story is about a reporter and his wife reporting from the tournament.
The Third Generation
A wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla terrorism in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which uses them to justify its authoritarian policies.
Lili Marleen
The story of a German singer named Willie who while working in Switzerland falls in love with a Jewish composer named Robert whose family is helping people to flee from the Nazis. Robert’s family is skeptical of Willie, thinking she could be a Nazi as she becomes famous for singing the song “Lili Marleen”.
Gods of the Plague
A man is released from prison and finds the society on the outside less than appealing. With several women as well as the police on his tail, he sets out to find an old friend.
Assignment K
Philip Scott, the boss of a toy company, is secretly also the chief of a British spy organization. Scott's cover is destroyed when enemy agents kidnap his girlfriend to force him to reveal the identities of his fellow spies.
The End of the Rainbow
Uwe Friessner’s first feature, At the End of the Rainbow, follows the exploits of a West Berlin teenager named Jimmi who ekes out a living through petty theft and part-time hustling, hangs out in punk clubs, and who, for reasons which this film subtly details, is thoroughly unemployable. Drawing on his own experience in trying to help a young runaway who eventually committed suicide, Friessner wrote into Jimmi’s story several older students who attempt to find work for him, and who give him shelter for a time in their commune.
Fear of Fear
After having her second child, a German housewife suffers from post-partum depression before inexplicably falling into a continually misdiagnosed mental state, befuddling her relatives.
I Only Want You to Love Me
The story of the young man Peter, who grew up during the economic miracle, bereft of parental care and love. Learning early on that interpersonal relationships are based on the principles of exchange or purchase, he abides by these rules and gives generous presents to his family and his wife Erika. But when he is unable to keep up this life-style, his story takes a horrendous turn ...
Nora Helmer
A childish wife reveals surprising strength when faced with blackmail. Based on A Doll's House by Ibsen, this is a video recording made for German television.
The Niklashausen Journey
Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Black Monk" suggests that he would have more success if he dressed up Johanna and had her appear as the Virgin Mary.
Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven
After a worker kills a superior and commits suicide, each of his family members attempts to forge a path forward in life.
Palermo or Wolfsburg
An impoverished young man from Sicily travels to Wolfsburg, West Germany to find work. He takes a job in the Volkswagen factory after he travels through Northern Italy by train.
Sky Without Stars
Anna is a factory worker in East Germany. Her five-year-old son Jochen lives with his grandparents in the West and Anna wants him to live with her, so she abducts him. Along the way she meets Carl who helps her with her son and they fall in love.
Mathias Kneißl
Inspired by the real life events of Mathias Kneißl, a marginal man, son of poor farmers from Bavaria, in the late XIX Century. Mathias stole from the riches to give to the poor, becoming a hero for the rural people, and a popular social rebel. He was chased by the police until his unfortunate sentence.
Bimbes: Die schwarzen Kassen des Helmut Kohl
During the donations scandal of 1999/2000, Helmut Kohl gave his legendary "word of honor" not to name any donors. This documentary explores the question of what this word of honor was really all about
She, a Chinese
This is the story of Mei, a young woman on a trip from East to West after her escape from her provincial Chinese village. Beginning in Chongqing and a disastrous factory job, Mei soon heads out for London and a marriage to an older man where her entrapment begins anew.
The Colour Room
A pioneering ceramic artist Clarice Cliff roares to prominence in the 1920s while working in Britain’s Stoke-on-Trent pottery industry.
Whity
"Whity" is the mulatto butler of the dysfunctional Nicholson family in the American southwest in 1878. The father, Ben Nicholson, has an attractive young wife Katherine, and two sons by a previous marriage; the homosexual Frank, and the retarded Davy. Whity tries to carry out all their orders, however demeaning, until various of the family members ask him to kill some of the others.
Jail Bait
Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz's play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young girl who, after persuading a local boy to become her lover, induces the anger of her father, whose incestuous sexual attentions to her have grown unbearable.
The Honeymooners
A bus driver and his sewer worker friend struggle to strike it rich while their wives look on with weary patience. One of the most influential situation comedy television series in American history.
Love Thy Neighbour
Love Thy Neighbour is a British sitcom, which was transmitted from 13 April 1972 until 22 January 1976, spanning seven series. The sitcom was produced by Thames Television for the ITV network. The principal cast included Jack Smethurst, Rudolph Walker, Nina Baden-Semper and Kate Williams. In 1973, the series was adapted into a film of the same name, and a later sequel series was set in Australia.
Clocking Off
How much do you know about the person working next to you? From the outside, life at Mackintosh Textiles appears to run smoothly, but in a community with so many secrets to hide, things are far from straightforward. In six powerful, self-contained dramas, everyday life is fractured by tumultuous marriages, snatched passions, disappearing husbands and gang harassment.
Fast wia im richtigen Leben
Fast wia im richtigen Leben is a German television series that portrays bizarre situations of everyday life in a inimitable comedic way.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
In late 1920s Berlin, Franz Biberkopf is released from prison and vows to go straight. However, he soon finds himself embroiled in the city’s criminal underworld.
The Life Of Riley
Riley worked in an aircraft plant in California, but viewers usually saw him at home, cheerfully disrupting life with his malapropisms and ill timed intervention into minor problems.
Ku'damm 56 – Rebel With a Cause
At the Berlin dance school "Galant," worlds collide and the struggle between prudishness and emancipation is carried out. The proprietor of the dance school, Caterina Schöllack, has three daughters whom she orders to integrate into this hierarchically structured society. Two of her daughters seem to abide by their mother's wish. Only Monika, the middle daughter, rejects the given path and discovers rock 'n' roll for herself.
Our Miracle Years
In a politically, morally and economically destroyed country, three sisters of an industrialist family in post-war Germany reinvent themselves and set the course for their future.
A Perfect Crime
In April 1991, Detlev Rohwedder, the head of Treuhand, the East German Privatization and Restructuring Agency, was assassinated in Dusseldorf. This documentary details the strange evidence recovered.
A Small Light
Twentysomething Miep Gies didn't hesitate when her boss Otto Frank came to her and asked her to hide his family from the Nazis during World War II. For the next two years, Miep, her husband Jan, and the other helpers watched over the eight souls in hiding in the Secret Annex. And it was Miep who found Anne’s Diary and kept it safe so Otto, the only one of the eight who survived, could later share it with the world as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust.
The Great Runaway
A miniseries about a pair of teenagers living in a slum at the fringes of Berlin. Alcoholism, prostitution, and violence are just a few of the themes of the three movies.
American Factory
In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America.
Commissioned to make a working-class family drama for public television, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the assignment and ran, dodging expectations by depicting social realities in West Germany from a critical—yet far from cynical—perspective. Over the course of five episodes, the sprawling story tracks the everyday triumphs and travails of the young toolmaker Jochen and many of the people populating his world, including the woman he loves, his eccentric family, and his fellow workers, with whom he bands together to improve conditions on the factory floor.
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day Starring Gottfried John, Hanna Schygulla, Luise Ullrich, Werner Finck, and more. If you liked Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day then you may also like: The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz, We Cellar Children, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, Rio das Mortes, Rosemary and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz
A satire on war and on the stupid things war inspires people to do. Four young men enter an abandoned fortress. Inside, they find military uniforms, which they immediately resolve to use to stage a bizarre war game. Their actions appear all the more senseless in relation to the peaceful everyday reality of the workers in the surrounding countryside.