The best Therese Hämer’s drama movies

Follows the lives of different couples in dealing with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during a frantic few days before Christmas in Frankfurt, Germany.

What could be lovelier than Women's Lake - a magical summer setting near Berlin? Rosa, perhaps. She's the slightly melancholy guardian of the lake, spending her days in a boat, trapping fish and watching for poachers. Or her lover, the polished and prosperous Kirsten, with her perfect cottage on the shore of Frauensee. How does their relationship work, and what effect will the two young lesbians in the canoe have on it all? Thoughtful, complex and beautiful.

A young man and his wife struggling to create a good life for themselves in a new country. Based on Louise Erdrich's novel 'The Master Butchers Singing Club'.

Becker is a German ex-con trying to hold down a job as a night watchman, but a chance encounter with the man whose family Becker killed 18 years earlier sends his new life spiraling out of control.

Margarethe von Trotta's TV movie focuses on a woman whose life is destroyed by her addiction to alcohol. Angela Rinser is a happy mother of two children and quite successful in her job as bilingual secretary. The sudden death of her husband changes everything. She starts drinking and loses her job. Her children Felicitas and Max try to hush up their social decline for years because they don't want to live in a foster home.

The film starts with the main character Laura, a young woman with advanced cancer, entering quite upset the home of her parents and claiming to have stopped chemo therapy and having left her husband. The worried parents call the other three adult daughters into the house and they arrive one by one. For the first time in 6 years the entire family is united again. The characters are drawn as tensions rise from old conflicts and as the situation sinks in that Laura might be terminally ill. The movie eventually shifts from a lively sometimes comical beginning into the serious theme of dying and does handle this quite tactfully and moving. While the film touches on many areas surrounding death (including religion, graveyard, care, eutanasia) the main focus is on the transformation of the characters that are thrown out of their busy lifes into this situation, eventually accepting it and dealing with it.

After several strokes of fate ends a rage eruption of the otherwise so quiet power engineering technician Felix Grünler with a criminal complaint for assault. A grateful affair for his sister-in-law Karin, who forges an intrigue to gain the inheritance of her mother-in-law. She succeeds in having Felix admitted to psychiatry as incompetent. He is determined not to get into therapy. For doctors, this confirms the picture of the labile patient. But in the other patients Felix gives his consistent anti-attitude in the long run benevolent recognition.