Saturday, November 14: 8:30 pm

Freshly laundered sheets, crisp tablecloths, and fluffy bath towels adorn the bedrooms, dining rooms, and bath racks of Berlin’s finest hotels. Surprising at it seems, those clean white linens are washed, dried, and pressed not at a nearby Berlin laundry but across the River Odra in a small town in neighboring Poland. Taking his camera to Widuchowa, German filmmaker Hans-Christian Schmid tours the border town where Fliegel Textile provides 24-hour turnaround service to its hotel clients. By meeting some of the female employees and their families, the film quietly exposes how the global marketplace is affecting small-town eastern Europe, where labor is cheaper and life is harder. Working shifts on a rotating seven-day, 24-hour schedule interferes with family life, so everyone, including the children, pitch in to ensure the housework and the cooking get done. But nurturing relationships with wives, husbands, and children requires more than paying the bills and ticking off chores, and as the lure of better-paying jobs calls more townspeople abroad, these workers struggle to keep their families together.