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Year of production : 2008

Director(s) : Hans-Christian SCHMID
Writer(s) : Hans-Christian SCHMID
Producer(s) : Britta KNÖLLER (23/5 Filmproduktion GmbH), Hans-Christian SCHMID (23/5 Filmproduktion GmbH)

Hardly any guests of the high-class Berlin hotels have an idea of the journey the fresh sheets and towels in their rooms have completed before being exchanged with the used laundry each and every morning.
A dozen trucks travel 140 kilometers back and forth between Berlin and the small Polish town of Gryfino. There, located right beside the power plant that supplies the hot steam, lies the German laundry factory »Fliegel«. Four hundred Polish workers operate day and night for low wages, making sure that the containers from Berlin are filled with clean laundry and delivered back to the German capital city within 24 hours.
»The Wondrous World of Laundry« is a story about labor that has migrated and about the people, who carry it out day after day. Monika, who does shift work like her husband and worries about her daughter Marta’s future after she lost her job at the laundry. Beata, a single mother, who lives under the same roof with her boy friend and his ex-wife and tries to make ends meet together with her three children. And Beata’s mother Lidia, who has set her mind on earning some additional money by going to London to pot tulips for six months.
Three generations of women, one collective, modest dream: to find private happiness, a home to call one’s own, a family. And the desire that their children will have it better one day. Five years after Poland’s entry into the European Union the borders to Germany are open, but the shining world of Berlin’s five-star-hotels is still a far cry away.