Die Polizistin (2001)

Twenty-seven-year-old Anne Küster used to work for the post office, but lost her job there as part of a staff reduction. Hope for a fresh start, both professionally and personally, outweighs her doubts when she begins work as a police sergeant after completing police academy, in the bleak high-rise district of Lütten Klein in Rostock. Anne can certainly handle herself physically, but she is also a very sensitive and kind person; at the same time, police work is shaped by tedious bureaucracy and dealing with people whose lives are marked by social poverty. The job is therefore difficult for Anne, and she does not always manage to keep her distance. “You need to grow a thick skin,” advises Mike, her patrol-car partner and colleague, who wants more than the trusting, buddy-like relationship he has with Anne. Anne and Mike do become intimate once, and Anne does like Mike, but in the end she does not want a relationship with him and tries not to patrol with him anymore. Earlier, Anne and Mike have to tell parents about the bizarre death of their adult son: in a forest, far from any body of water, he had been masturbating while wearing a diving suit and, for extra excitement, had pulled a plastic bag over his head. He wanted to experience his climax especially intensely as a “little death,” but suffocated; instead of just the “little” death, he experienced the “big death.” Anne gets along well with her all-male colleagues, incidentally, although, for lack of another option, she has to share the shower with them at the police station. When Anne meets ten-year-old Benny, who finds no stability in his family environment, she decides to take care of him. In the process, she meets and falls in love with Benny’s father, Jegor, a Russian petty criminal; she feels strangely drawn to him. But Anne increasingly struggles to balance personal compassion with professional duty. When Jegor tries to get money for Benny’s class trip by committing a burglary, events spiral out of control: Anne is called to the break-in with a colleague, identifies Jegor as the perpetrator, and arrests him. At the end of the film, Anne manages to get things—and especially her feelings—back under control, and walks out of the picture together with Benny, the boy she is very fond of. The policewoman’s story ends on a hopeful note.