| Strike | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Volker Schlöndorff |
| Produced by | Jürgen Haase |
| Written by | Sylke Rene Meyer Andreas Pflüger |
| Starring | Katharina Thalbach Andrzej Chyra Dominique Horwitz |
| Distributed by | Provobis Film/Berlin |
| Release date(s) | September 11, 2006 (Toronto Film Festival) February 19 2007 (Germany) February 23 2007 (Poland) |
| Running time | 111 min. |
| Language | Polish |
| IMDb profile | |
Strike is a Polish language film produced by a mainly German group, released in 2006 and directed by Volker Schlöndorff. The film is broadly a docudrama. It covers the formation of Solidarity. The action centers around work and labor organizing in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. The film follows the life of Agnieszka Kowalska (Katharina Thalbach) in about three segments covering first her life as a dedicated worker in communist Poland of the early Sixties (DVD chapters 1-4), then following events leading to the Polish 1970 protests (chapters 5-10), and finally the early Eighties including the dedication of the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970, the Gdańsk Agreement, and Martial law in Poland (chapters 11-15). The tagline "can a single person change the course of history?" is misleading; firstly the labor leadership was highly collective and also because the character of Agnieszka is based on at least two women, the crane operator Anna Walentynowicz and the diminutive shipyard nurse Alina Pieńkowska. Generally Agnieszka's life is based on Walentynowicz. However, it was Pienkowska who called Jacek Kuroń in Warsaw to announce the strike, and she is generally credited with demanding "solidarity" at the shipyard gates to continue the strike.
