Struggle

With this film, Ruth Mader made a powerful feature début that has a timeless steadfastness in all its topicality. The film tells the story of the illegal Polish immigrant Ewa and her little daughter. After spending several weeks in Austria picking strawberries, she decides not to go back in the bus, but to take the battle for a better existence and a better future for her and her child into her own hands. Her vicissitudes are meticulously, very realistically and hence very convincingly shown. Based on a specific case, Mader shows clearly how the callous world economy intervenes in the lives of individual people. She shows the everyday and almost matter-of-fact forms of exploitation which beset a woman without position. Evidence of Mader’s director’s instinct is formed by her choice of the Polish actress Aleksandra Justa (who plays a phenomenal role as Ewa) to carry the film to a large extent. Her often taciturn yet incontrovertible presence on screen and her ability to be a poor Polish working woman instead of playing one provides the film with a jagged and authentic power. While the position of Ewa is apparently hopeless and her life is painfully harsh, the film is not without cheer. Because you don’t enter a battle in order to lose it. (GjZ)