Strike

Volker Schlöndorff, the Academy Award winner director of The Tin Drum, returns to North American screens with Strike (“Strajk – Die Heldin von Danzig”). Based on actual events, Strike is based on the true story of a remarkable and little known figure who was integral in beginning the Solidarity movement and setting Poland on the course to democracy. It is a touching tribute to a true overlooked hero, a woman who undergoes an important awakening – the realization of an ordinary person who simply looks around her and distinguishes right from wrong. Just as the simple action of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat provided a catalyst for the entire Civil Rights Movement, so the actions of this single worker set the strikes in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk in motion, ultimately bringing about the Solidarity Movement, the rise of Lech Walesa, Perestroika, and eventually to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In the film, Agnieszka is a shipyard welder and crane operator who is a loyal and dedicated worker. Taunted by her peers for being such a paragon of virtue, she nonetheless advocates tirelessly for workers’ rights and is a thorn in the side of her Communist Party bosses. Her radical politicization begins when she witnesses many of her fellow workers die in an industrial accident. When their widows are denied pensions, she really begins to confront her superiors about the many inequities of working in the shipyard. Then, when she is fired after 20 years of uncompromised service to the company, her fellow workers show their solidarity and strike in order to force her reinstatement. Suddenly the whole shipyard is striking and as a groundswell of outrage and support builds nationwide, all Polish factories soon have a work stoppage. “Solidarność” (Solidarity) is born.

Strike reunites actress Katharina Thalbach (as Agnieszka) with Volker Schlöndorff, who directed her in The Tin Drum, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. One of Schlöndorff’s more recent credits is The Ninth Day. The Strike screenplay is by Andreas Pflüger. The producer is Jürgen Haase. Strike is being distributed by Red Envelope Entertainment/Laemmle Zeller Films.

“This movie, much of which was filmed in and around the Gdansk shipyards where the real events took place, is rough-hewn and modest, stirring but rarely grandiose. This seems fitting, since part of what made Solidarity so inspiring was its gritty, determined refusal of ideological grandstanding or political melodrama.” (A.O. Scott, New York Times)