In der Höhle der Löwin (2003)

Dr. Maja von Wiesenthal is a passionate surgeon who works 32-hour on-call shifts, often followed by another shift in the ambulance. She leaves little time for her personal life, even standing up her boyfriend, Frijo, on their anniversary. Frijo can’t go on living like this and decides to leave Maja. But because she never has time for him and he can’t make her understand his decision, he pretends to have a heart attack so an ambulance has to come and Maja will finally listen to him. She thinks it’s a joke, but when she realizes how serious things are, the ground seems to fall away beneath her feet. She finds comfort at work, but also with her mother, Charlotte. After Charlotte’s roommate has to spend a long time in the hospital following an accident, she decides to move in with her daughter. Maja is anything but pleased. The mother-daughter pair bicker from time to time in their everyday life, and Maja compensates by throwing herself into her work as a surgeon. Her colleague, Dr. Nick Freiberg, makes it clear to her, however, that she should be glad she still has a mother. So she tries to come to terms with her mother, which is not easy for her. Charlotte wants to help Maja win Frijo back and advises her to make him jealous. Surely she has every opportunity to find a man for that at work. And who knows, perhaps she’ll even like him better than her ex-boyfriend. To confront Frijo with Maja’s supposed new admirer, Charlotte signs him up for computer classes. He naturally has to come to Charlotte’s, where he inevitably runs into Maja—though she comes home without anyone accompanying her. The two argue, and nothing has improved. Charlotte is convinced she shouldn’t give up and should try again. Unfortunately, Maja can’t persuade any of her colleagues to get involved with her. This convinces her that she should now seriously fight for Frijo’s love. At first, she gets nowhere: when she tells him she’s doing it only so she can get her mother out of the house, he naturally refuses to get back together with her. Through all her failures, Maja keeps talking things over with her mother, bringing them a little closer. For the first time, they have a serious conversation about Maja’s father, whom she never really got to know because he died too soon. Charlotte praises him highly, saying she too had had to fight for his love for a long time. While Maja tries to research her father online, Charlotte uses the time to find her daughter a new man. She places a personal ad to find suitable candidates, but Maja rejects them all outright. Then Maja discovers that her supposed father, Bodo von Wiesenthal, cannot actually be her father, and that her mother’s stories about him were made up. This leads to a major argument. Charlotte now has to tell Maja the truth: her biological father was Manfred Fels, the fiancé of Charlotte’s best friend, whom Charlotte could not marry because her mother was adamantly opposed. In her grief over Manfred, she had settled for Bodo, who needed a conventional marriage for his political career. As the memories come flooding back, Charlotte suffers a spell of weakness. Meanwhile, Maja manages to track down her father, who is living in a retirement home and has been divorced for 30 years. He is astonished to discover he has a daughter, and the encounter is also a surprise for Charlotte, as she comes face to face with the great love of her life. Despite all the years they have gone without seeing each other, the old magic returns. Maja leaves them alone and goes to Frijo. She confesses her love for him and says she finally knows what she has in him. Frijo, who never stopped loving Maja, can see that she really has changed and is willing to give their relationship another try.