"Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. You're here to pick strawberries in the coming six weeks. You should be aware that your pay
will depend on the actual amount you turn in. The rate is 25 cents per kilogram. Each of you will receive a number under which
the amount of strawberries you pick will be registered, and we calculate your pay on that basis. Two hundred kilos per day,
which is more than realistic, will bring you 50 euros. Each workday begins at 5 o'clock in the morning and ends at 6 in the
evening.
And now, my friends, it's time to fold your hands and pray to God that it doesn't rain." The bus on which the friendly agent
prepares his crew for their job is not on its way to a neighboring country in the East where lower wages are the norm, it's
heading toward Austria. Polish laborers who are willing to work for less than the minimum wage are hired to pick more-or-less
ripe red strawberries in Lower Austria's Marchfeld region. Strawberries, those sweet harbingers of summer, were not the only
inspiration for Ruth Mader's Struggle, an extremely realistic though fictitious look at the world of work. An article in a weekly magazine about low-paid laborers
gave the filmmaker the idea of developing a screenplay together with co-authors Martin Leidenfrost and Barbara Albert. Its
most outstanding quality is without a doubt the minimalistic narrative style. The central character of Struggle, 29-year-old Mader's debut film, is Eva. A young Pole and single mother on her way home from picking strawberries in Austria,
she leaves the bus at the border. Together with her eight-year-old daughter, Eva takes a chance on finding a better life for
the two of them in the West.
Eva scrubs swimming pools, polishes souvenirs, drags cartons of meat around, leaves her daughter to her own devices during
the day, keeps her eyes peeled for the police and falls into bed with exhaustion each night. At her wit's end, she ends up
in a relationship with a divorced real-estate agent with unusual sexual tastes. Eva hopes that this affair will help her survive
this struggle. In Struggle, more important than this woman's personal story is the work itself: The camera shows the strawberry fields and the bent-over
pickers in the pouring rain or sizzling heat in shots lasting several minutes. No commentary, no dialogue. A scene at a turkey
farm shows the perfected routine in the processing chain which prepares the animal for the deep freeze and our shopping carts.
Each worker performs a single movement, precisely and apathetically, and more times in the course of a shift than anyone cares
to count. Silently and without pause, three women stand and polish small glass ornaments. The head doctor in a psychiatric
clinic remains silent when a patient throws a glass of water in her face in front of her assembled colleagues. Without meeting
a single human being, the real-estate agent inspects his desolate properties.
With unemotional matter-of-factness, Ruth Mader visits microcosms of the working world, showing their senselessness and alienating
nature in almost excruciating realtime. "I wanted to show," claimed the director, "how wearisome work processes are and demonstrate
what happens before the strawberries or the meat ends up in our supermarkets. My particular interest was the harshness of
the struggle to find work and survive which everyone has to contend with every day. This struggle takes place on all levels,
regardless of age or social class, whether you're from the East or West- it's the same for everyone, only the consequences
vary." One of Mader's most important objectives was to present her characters in their work environments, and except for the
protagonist and the real-estate agent, everyone was filmed while performing their daily routines. An agency in Warsaw provided
the actress who played Eva, an excellent discovery by the name of Aleksansdra Justa. In her virtually silent role, she delivers
a subtle and nuanced depiction of Eva's daily life. Ruth Mader wastes no words in telling her story. Elliptically and in broad
strokes, she uses a minimum of key scenes to tell the stories of three generations, and this conciseness is employed skillfully
to create tension. "I find it extremely important," explains the filmmaker, "to free myself from the ballast of conventional
narrative form. In my opinion telling things which are unable to stir up emotions is unnecessary ballast, and we tried to
leave that out." Struggle brings together people from eastern Europe who are financially exploited in a brazen manner and Westerners glutted with material
wealth and on the edge of emotional crisis.
Karin Schiefer (2003)