Best movies like Kai from the Box

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Kai from the Box Starring Christoph Zeller, Jürgen Watzke, Klaus-Dieter Klebsch, Kirsten Block, and more. If you liked Kai from the Box then you may also like: Night People, Rabbit à la Berlin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Emil and the Detectives, Desperate Moment 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.

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Night People

A US intelligence officer, stationed in Germany, is caught in a political dilemma when the Russians kidnap a young Army private, the son of prominent American businessman. In exchange for the soldier's return, the Russians attempt to barter a trade for an elderly German couple who they want for treason.

Rabbit à la Berlin

The untold story about wild rabbits which lived between the Berlin Walls. For 28 years Death Zone was their safest home. Full of grass, no predators, guards protecting them from human disturbance. They were closed but happy. When their population grew up to thousands, guards started to remove them. But rabbits survived and stayed there. Unfortunately one day the wall fell down. Rabbits had to abandon comfortable system. They moved to West Berlin and have been living there in a few colonies since then. They are still learning how to live in the free world, same as we - the citizens of Eastern Europe.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

In 2015, thirty year old refugee Francis, the sole survivor of a boat that illegally crossed the Mediterranean, is drawn into Berlin's seedy underbelly.

Emil and the Detectives

When Emil travels by bus to Berlin to visit his grandmother and his cousin, his money is stolen by a crook who specializes in digging tunnels. Emil must get the money back as it is for his grandmother. While following the thief, Emil runs into Gustav, an enterprising young boy who gathers up all his friends to help Emil find the money. Emil's cousin also gets involved and they get into more trouble than they bargained for when Emil's pickpocket turns out to be mixed up with a couple of notorious bank robbers.

Desperate Moment

Story of a Dutchman's flight across post-war Germany trying to locate the man who alone can clear him of a false murder charge. (BFI Website)

Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler

Dr. Mabuse and his organization of criminals are in the process of completing their latest scheme, a theft of information that will allow Mabuse to make huge profits on the stock exchange. Afterwards, Mabuse disguises himself and attends the Folies Bergères show, where Cara Carozza, the main attraction of the show, passes him information on Mabuse's next intended victim, the young millionaire Edgar Hull. Mabuse then uses psychic manipulation to lure Hull into a card game where he loses heavily. When Police Commissioner von Wenk begins an investigation of this mysterious crime spree, he has little to go on, and he needs to find someone who can help him.

Emil and the Detectives

The twelve-year-old Emil and his father are haunted by bad luck. To take a break from a series of family disasters, Emil is allowed to spend a few days with a friend of the family, the female priest Hummel in Berlin. In the train he runs across the slick Max Grundeis who anaesthetizes Emil and steals his savings of 1500 DM. When he finally arrives in Berlin, Emil and a gang of street kids, led by the cheeky girl Pony Hütchen, try to find the gangster, who haunts the posh Hotel Adlon as a hotel thief. Meanwhile, to prevent anyone from finding out about Emil's mishap, Gypsi, a member of the gang of kids, passes himself off as Emil, thus wreaking havoc on the home of the priest.

Germany, Year Zero

In the ruins of post-WWII Berlin, a twelve-year-old boy is left to his own devices in order to help provide for his family.

The Man Between

A British woman on a visit to post-war Berlin is caught up in an espionage ring smuggling secrets into and out of the Eastern Bloc.

Harvest

Breathtaking in its subtle beauty, Harvest is an achingly romantic tale of an innocent but ever increasingly passionate affair that develops between two simple farmhands. Life on a farm is all that sullen teen Marco knows- leading a perfunctory and quiet life of working, going to school and avoiding the advances of girls. However, his self-imposed solitude ends when curly-haired Jakob, rejecting the banking world for farming, arrives to train on the farm. Although initially cautious and tentative with each other, it is soon obvious that the unspoken sexual tension is becoming increasingly hard to resist - something a spontaneous trip to Berlin. Proving that true love can blossom in even the most unlikely of places, Harvest is as rich and rewarding as it is heart-warming.

People on Sunday

A semi-documentary experimental 1930 German silent film created by amateurs with a small budget. With authentic scenes of the metropolis city of Berlin, it's the first film from the later famous screenwriters/directors Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.

Café Nagler

The director embarks on a journey to reveal the story behind the legendary Café Nagler, owned by her family during the 1920s in Berlin, and finds that historical truths can be overrated.

Comedian Harmonists

Comedian Harmonists tells the story of a famous, German male sextet, five vocals and piano, the "Comedian Harmonists", from the day they meet first in 1927 to the day in 1934, when they become banned by the upcoming Nazis, because three of them are Jewish.

Asphalt

One of the last great German Expressionist films of the silent era, Joe May’s Asphalt is a love story set in the traffic-strewn Berlin of the late 1920s. Starring the delectable Betty Amann in her most famous leading role, Asphalt is a luxuriously produced UFA classic where tragic liaisons and fatal encounters are shaped alongside the constant roar of traffic.

The Berliner

Long before he played the corpulent Goldfinger, German actor Gert Froebe was a scarecrow-skinny comedian. In Berliner Ballade, Froebe makes his screen debut as Otto, a feckless Everyman who tries to adjust to the postwar travails of his defeated nation. Stymied by black-market profiteers and government bureaucrats, Otto begins fantasizing about a happier life at the end of that ever-elusive rainbow. Director R. A. Stemmle doesn't have to strive for pathos: he merely places his gangly star amidst the ruins of a bombed-out Berlin, and the point is made for him. Filmed in 1948, Berliner Ballade was later released in the U.S. as The Berliner.

Prinzessinnenbad

A film about three teenagers - Klara, Mina and Tanutscha - from the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. The trio have known each other since Kindergarten and have plenty in common. The three 15-year-olds are the best of friends; they are spending the summer at Prinzenbad, a large open-air swimming pool at the heart of the district where they live. They're feeling pretty grown up, and are convinced they've now left their childhood behind.

Overseas and Under Your Skin

Ida is a woman who was adopted to Finland from Africa as a child. Ida is an unemployed seamstress approaching her thirties and still lives at home with her activist mother Kati. Kati wants to fix her daughter's life and offers her a job at her work. Encouraged by her new friend Ville, Ida, however, sets out for Berlin in order to find a job and to prove to her mother that she can manage on her own. Meanwhile, Kati has been told that she is seriously ill, but she does not want to mention it to Ida in fear of standing in the way of her daughter's struggle for independence. Ida wants to have a life of her own, but what will she have left at the end of the day?

Tough Enough

From the youth directed novel of the same name by Greogor Tressnow comes a film by Detlev Buck that is a realistic portrait of life in the section of Berlin called Neukölln. It’s about power and weakness, delinquents and victims, and the difficulties a 15-year-old faces in a poor and criminal environment.

Meier

Meier, a paperhanger in East Berlin, inherits from his father in West Berlin. With this money he wants to fulfil himself the dream of his life: a journey around the world. He buys a forged West German passport and pretends to go on a trip to Bulgaria while he really is off to see the free world. When he wants to return to East Berlin he finds himself in an unbelievable predicament and his double life begins. He can't keep away from his East German friends. As with all the best comedies, the action builds up to an eventual crisis. It's a light comedy, which won several national Film Academy Awards. The film is very political, with lots of political jokes/innuendos which only Germans will understand. One is left feeling what a total obscenity that stupid Wall was, dividing one people for 30 years (1-2 Generations) simply by the coincidence on where you just happen to be in the early morning on the 13th August 1961.

Playgirl

Alexandra is a model who comes to Berlin to rekindle an affair she started in Rome with businessman Joachim Steigenwald. But he pretends to be too busy for her and has his employee take Alexandra sightseeing. He, too, immediately falls under her enchantment. When they encounter Steigenwald, she finds herself between the two men, as someone who is always up for flirting with men …

Russendisko

Three young Russian friends, who move from Moscow to Berlin in a lucky wave of emigration right after the fall of the Berlin wall. They take their chance looking for a better life and find themselves involved in the tales of everyday lunacy on the streets of Berlin and its spirit of the early nineties.

The Tigress

It's the roaring twenties in Berlin. The Tigress, a gorgeous, wild, and very independent street walker, falls for a handsome grifter. When one of her lovers gets jealous, she betrays him and has to skip town. The grifter reveals he has what it takes to move in upper class circles and suggests they flee to Carlsbad, a spa in Czechoslovakia. Does he love her or is he only using her? Is the Tigress madly in love with him or does she want to satisfy her vanity and drop him once he falls for her? The ancient cat and mouse game between a man and a woman unfolds amidst sensual seduction, the scheme of robbing a rich Texan and the jilted lover arriving from Berlin, gun drawn.

Angels of Iron

The subject of this historical drama is a splintering Berlin in the years of 1948 and 1949. Played against the backdrop of social upheaval, the characters in the drama come to epitomize the best and worst of each pole of the political sphere. A 17-year-old hoodlum by the name of Gladow works hand-in-glove with a local white-collar criminal to rob and pillage every day and night, defying capture. While he and his gang of thugs are terrorizing the people of Berlin, the Soviets are trying to make the blockade of their region of control impermeable. The future casts long shadows over the drama, as Berlin's problems take the shape of times to come.

Berlin and Brandenburg From Above

25 years after the reunion between East and West Germany, this movie shows pictures from different perspectives of people and country, during a glide flight above the metropolis. Which visions and dreams marked this region? What changed and what emerged from the city’s contentious history? We take a look from above to see the city and its citizens.

Escape from East Berlin

East Berlin, shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Kurt Schröder and his family dig a tunnel to escape to West Berlin as they struggle to overcome the obstacles blocking their underground path to freedom.

Spider's Web

Ulrich Mühe plays a German businessman who was born completely without scruples. This makes him an eminently suitable candidate for success in the chaotic years after World War I. The shameless man's story is contrasted with that of his polar opposite, a Jewish anarchist.

Nemez

Right out of jail, Dima tries to make a new beginning in Berlin, Germany. But his past holds him back. His criminal associates continue to rely on Dima and his father wants to take his family back to their native Russia. Only the relationship with art student Nadja gives Dima hope. If only there wasn't his ciminal past.

Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness

Mutter Krause, her daughter Erna and her son Paul live in a tenement in the poorer section of Berlin's Wedding district. Along with them lives "the Tenant", his soon-to-be bride Friede, who works as a prostitute, and her child whose name isn't revealed in the film. Mutter Krause is a quiet, long-suffering old woman who earns what little she can delivering newspapers. However, Paul is an alcoholic and spends all her money on drink. Mutter Krause can't pay back the money she owes the man whose newspapers she delivered and he accuses her of stealing and threatens her with arrest. Mutter Krause must then pawn her last valuable possession, a treasured memento of her late husband. Paul then breaks into the same pawn shop. He gets away but is later arrested. Meanwhile, Erna begins dating a young man with Communist views, who turns Erna to Communism and also helps her earn the money her mother needs by more honest means.

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