Die Friseuse (2010)

The job-seeking hairdresser Kathi König lives with her teenage daughter Julia in a prefabricated-housing estate in Berlin-Marzahn, after separating from her husband. Her youthful sweetheart and ex-husband, Micha, has since remarried and still lives with his new wife and their daughter in their former home in Gräfenhainichen. Julia, who is far from happy with their living situation and dreams of spending a year as an exchange student in the United States, blames her mother Kathi for the marriage ending so soon. When Kathi hears through the Jobcenter about a vacancy at the modern Krieger hair salon in the Eastgate Berlin shopping center, a phone conversation with the employer makes it seem as though the job is already hers. But when she turns up at the salon, the owner tells her that because of her obesity she is “not aesthetic,” and therefore will not get the job. The rejection hits Kathi hard. The next morning, when she plans to return to Krieger and fight for the job, she makes a discovery: the Vietnamese owners of a neighboring Asian snack bar are being taken away by the police, and the premises are being closed until further notice. She then decides to rent the space for her own hairdressing business. The shopping center manager is initially skeptical of the idea, but accepts Kathi’s application. The Employment Agency and the business start-up advisory service, however, both advise Kathi against it. To raise the money needed to open the business, she and Silke, who is also unemployed, go from nursing home to nursing home as a mobile hairdressing team, until one of their clients dies under the hood dryer and their illegal work is exposed. Desperate, Kathi secretly takes a substantial sum from her daughter’s hidden piggy bank so she can pay the first month’s rent and deposit. But just when she wants to claim her start-up allowance, the Employment Office staff happen to be on strike. Kathi then helps the petty criminal Joe smuggle a group of twelve Vietnamese women and eight men from Poland into Germany, and subsequently hides them in her apartment. In the process, Kathi and the slim Tien, who studied in East Germany and speaks German well, grow closer. Earlier, she had rejected the advances of Klaus, who is well-off but also somewhat overweight. Kathi ultimately has to close her hair salon because of official requirements and an unexpected diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, before it has properly opened. Instead, she gets a job at a Vietnamese hair salon.