The best Dagmar Manzel’s movies

A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.

Hella is around 30 and works in a pharmacy. She is waiting for the right man to step into her life, but as she has a certain affinity for losers, she is kind of disillusionized. When she gets to know Levin, a dentist student who likes cars most, her dreams seem to come true. Levin has a very rich grandfather who likes her at first glance. The old man thinks of changing his last will to the condition that Levin has to marry Hella in order to inherit his fortunes. Like in a fairy-tale the door to a new life opens for Hella, but can she take it?

Philipp, a closeted teacher, is dating a female colleague to keep up appearances. One night he stumbles into a gay bar and falls for a man. Transformed by this love, he is no longer afraid to face up to who he is.

Benjamin is a 16 year old half-side spastic with lousy grades in math, who switches to a boarding school to reach grammar school. Acclimatization to the new environment is difficult in the first place and he has to struggle with the various problems of coming of age, when he falls in love to the school's dream girl Malen.

Schtonk! is a farce of the actual events of 1983, when Germany's Stern magazine published, with great fanfare, 60 volumes of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler – which two weeks later turned out to be entirely fake. Fritz Knobel (based on real-life forger Konrad Kujau) supports himself by faking and selling Nazi memorabilia. When Knobel writes and sells a volume of Hitler's (nonexistent) diaries, he thinks it's just another job. When sleazy journalist Hermann Willié learns of the diaries, however, he quickly realizes their potential value... and Knobel is quickly in over his head. As the pressure builds and Knobel is forced to deliver more and more volumes of the fake diaries, he finds himself acting increasingly like the man whose life he is rewriting. The film is a romping and hilarious satire, poking fun not only at the events and characters involved in the hoax (who are only thinly disguised in the film), but at the discomfort Germany has with its difficult past.

Georg "Schorsch" Kempter is a gardener in a small Bavarian town, working day-in, day-out in his nursery, which is facing bankruptcy. He doesn't like to talk much. He never has. His marriage has long lost all its magic and on top of that, he has trouble to connect with his daughter. Only when he is flying in his own rickety biplane, Schorsch feels truly free. When the owner of the local golf course tries to cheat Schorsch for his money, claiming the shade of green of the grass Schorsch has planted on the golf course is not right, insolvency seems unavoidable. So just when his airplane is about to be impounded, Schorsch grabs the control stick and flies away in an attempt to save his plane and himself. He embarks onto a journey into the unknown, to places he has never seen before, full of odd and special encounters - and with every take-off and every landing, this tough man's heart slowly warms up to what you might call an idea of happiness.

Something terrible is about to happen in a small town in Germany. Nobody knows the reason why, except one person: Rico Bartsch. The 15-year old grammar school pupil, an absolute outsider, is in love with the most beautiful girl at his school. What in the beginning is a longing that can never be fulfilled will come true at the end of the story. Beautiful Regine will beg for Rico’s love. Until then several inhabitants of the town will die an unnatural death...

Anna, 17 years old, is happy to throw her first big birthday party without her parents, but some of her guests are so stoned that they leave a big chaos and, even worse, destroy the favorite record of Anna's father. After the return of her shocked and angry parents, Anna runs away to Munich with her admirer Simon. They discover the nightlife jungle and get to know some typical urban guys. Meanwhile, Anna's parents get in touch with Simon's and try to find their children. On the way across Munich, they remember their own wild and restless youth…

Hannah, a young Jewish girl, is rescued from a concentration camp by her Polish boyfriend, and believes he died after their perilous escape. More than 30 years later, the married Hannah faces an emotional crisis when she learns he's alive.

Based on the childhood memories of actor Michael Degen, the movie deals with the everyday struggle to survive as a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany. As his father had died in 1940 after being released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Michael and his mother fear to be deported themselves. They manage to live in Berlin with false names and faked papers, hidden by several, often broken, people...

An insecure drama student is given the lead role in a play by her director, but the role she is supposed to play is at odds with her real personality. The fusion of her stage persona and her real life persona becomes a psychological tour de force for the young woman, changing her private life.

A social satire in which a chauffeur accidentally becomes the editor of an online newspaper.

Franziska Naumann happily greets her allegedly new neighbor Dr. Gottfried Naumann. She is very surprised when he wants to move into the same apartment in which just the movers carry their furniture. Even Gottfried is surprised - Franziska has not only the same name as he, but apparently also rented the same apartment. Without compromising, the quarreled estate agents Beate and Werner Wüstholtz has rented the apartment twice. There is only one solution: until the circumstances are clarified, the unequal couple must live together in the apartment. The fight burns.