WAS WEISS DER TROPFEN DAVON

Each and every day a crew of immigrant workers cleans the Berlin Reichstag, Germany's most influential institution. They drive around the majestic building with their yellow garbage carts, high-tech floor sweepers and squeegees. They mop the floors of the endless corridors, dust the fashionable lampshades, and clean the countless windows of this noble monument to German politics, as in a profane ballet. The migrants get very close to the building's surfaces, but they remain very far away from its insights: One man enthusiastically scrubbing a text engraved in the floor explains that some letters are harder to clean than others. But what the text in fact means, he wouldn't know. His colleague tells us that the Christian Democratic Party is housed on the fifth floor and the Social Democrats are on the fourth, but to him there is no difference between the two parties. And he probably wouldn't vote, even if he were allowed to. And day after day, these low-income immigrant workers remain invisible to the mighty politicians whose windows they clean.

Award: new berlin film award, 2007