Die Friseuse (2010)

The obese East-Berliner hairdresser (FRISEUSE) Kathi is unemployed and full of challenges. A divorced single mother, she tries to scrape a living for herself and daughter in modern Berlin. She has lived there all or most of her life as her wildly thick Berlin accent reveals. Kathi's other characteristics such as looks and personality traits are not politically correct shortcomings, which often makes us laugh at her faults and desperation: at her failures, physical handicaps and humiliations..... Definitely, something most North Americans at least would not put up with on TV as film or HBO-style Family Entertainment, for sure... Kathi's world in Eastern Berlin is so unfair and drab, it's often hard to distinguish if she is still in Old East Berlin, or in the present. Her misery and situations she faces in her every day struggles are tragi-comic, at the same time universal and Berlin-specific. This makes the story doubly relevant for those who know about Berlin, what has happened as a result of the city's unification since 1989-90, and other "new" European Union geopolitical issues such as illegal immigration coming through nearby (35 miles) Poland, and many of the situations that these new realities present, and are handled by different people, usually not the sterotypical reactions that the media would have you expect.