Ich Chef, Du Turnschuh (1998)

The story revolves around Dudie, an Armenian asylum seeker. He is stranded with his girlfriend Nani and a group of other refugees aboard a container ship in the Port of Hamburg, a holding place for asylum seekers from all over the world. After Nani marries a German electrician as a ruse to escape the cramped conditions on the ship and deportation, the abandoned Dudie flees to Berlin with forged papers, settles into a run-down lodging house (where he meets Nina, who is willing to marry him too—but only for 15,000 marks, which he naturally has no way of raising), and starts working for low pay on a major construction site at the Reichstag. His supervisors and colleagues harass him—the Turkish Berliners working alongside him are the most insistent about throwing out foreigners like him—and his employer exploits him, driving Dudie increasingly to seek marriage to a German woman. To this end, he first, unfortunately, chooses his boss’s ex-wife. When his wages go unpaid, Dudie organizes a strike. This finally wins him friends on the construction site, but from then on he has to flee from the police. Nina has meanwhile genuinely fallen in love with the man living illegally in Germany, and the refugee has also proved to be a caring father figure to Nina’s son Leo. So a happy ending might still be within reach, were Nina not stabbed to death by her ex. Now homeless as well, Dudie scrapes by in the big-city world of Berlin with Leo, who understandably refuses to go into care. To solve their housing problem, the Armenian is eventually inspired by the methods of foreign con artists he has read about in Berlin’s yellow press: he dyes Leo’s hair black and, carrying his “son,” now called Hassan, in his arms and holding a letter he has forged himself from the Kreuzberg district office, once again takes advantage of Germans’ deference to authority. He presents himself to an elderly woman as someone who needs to be given accommodation; according to the letter, if she refuses, the 80-year-old will be sent to a retirement home. After living with Dudie for a while, however, the old woman has grown so fond of Dudie and Hassan that she no longer wants to let them go under any circumstances. But a suspicious, jealous friend of the German woman exposes Dudie, and the cheerful, kind-hearted free spirit is ultimately deported to Armenia after all—together with the German child.