The best Brigitte Böttrich’s drama movies

It's the 24th of December: The emergency department of a district hospital is preparing for a turbulent night: head physician Professor Singer, who has lost his wife and is even more involved in the work, and the surgeon Hannah Cornelsen, who talks about the work can forget that she and her husband have dwelt apart. On Christmas Eve, the hospital will become a microcosm in which a wide variety of people and destinies will meet - and for everyone, life will be in a completely different light next morning.

Based on a true story, Miguel Alexandre's two-part drama focuses on an East German woman and the fight for her children. Spring 1982: Sara Bender, living with her daughters Silvia and Sabine in the East German town of Erfurt, wants to marry her colleague Peter, but shortly before the wedding, her father is killed in a road accident. As the funeral takes place in West Germany, she isn't allowed to got there, so she starts planning to leave her communist home country forever. Trying to flee via Romania, she is caught by the secret service. After years in jail, Sara is ransomed by the West German government, but without her daughters. To draw the world's attention on her desperate situation, she starts demonstrating at the Berlin border crossing Checkpoint Charlie

Ironies abound in this extremely sad melodrama about Elif (Zuhal Olcay), a Turkish immigrant in Germany who has been sent to prison for murdering her abusive husband. At the time of her imprisonment, she has never ventured outside the Turkish community, and even there has had no friends because of the demands her husband placed on her. She speaks no German. Now, in a place which most people find to be hell on earth, she gains a never-before known taste of freedom among these strangers, who don't even speak her own language. Unfortunately, as a "guest worker," she is horrified to discover that she is soon to be transferred to the horrific prisons of Turkey and will stand trial there for her crime, which will be much less understandingly dealt with in her home country than it would have been in Germany. The false paradise she must say goodbye to is her German prison.