The picture is iconic: Laurent Amédéo in the center of a crowd of workers, charging, and yet boosting the group feeling. They are fighting messages that thunder out of him, words that sound as if they have been waiting for a long time to be heard. Amédéo is, one can say so, leaders and rebels.

Who is he leading and stirring? The factory staff of more than a thousand workers of a South-French automotive supplier, who belongs to a German-based company called Dimke Group. The latter had promised the workforce to safeguard the factory for the next five years if the workers slipped away part of their service.

The latter - as grudging as they were hopeful - worked the German mother in the bag and thereby kept to the agreement. The company board from the neighboring country is not. The company is simply no longer competitive in the market, they say.

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Film drama "Strike": A man at war

In the midst of the structurally weak region, hundreds are about to leave work. "Some of you will never find work again!" Predicts Amédéo. Despair is real. And it becomes more physical, more violent in the course of the confrontation.

Director Stéphane Brizé says: "Film certainly does not legitimize violence, but it does legitimize anger, and suffering is the rage, first suffering, then anger, and finally violence." "Strike", which in French means "En Guerre" and thus clarifies the state of war in which it is found here, replicates the smoke that precedes the major fire. He resorts to a fictionalization of documentary means - Brizé does not want to tell a story, but capture the momentum.

"Strike" is pure presence, drives in the short term, seems to act without vision. In this way, he captures a mood that is highly emotional, that vacillates between victory and defeat, that heats up dangerously again and again, and that is shaped by Laurent Amédéo, embodied by Vincent Lindon, in a consistent direction. His credo is: do not give up, stand up, join forces to avert a closure.

"Strike"
Original title: "En Guerre"
France 2018
Director: Stéphane Brizé
Book: Stéphane Brizé, Olivier Gorce
Performers: Vincent Lindon, Mélanie Rover, Jacques Borderie, David Rey, Olivier Lemaire, Martin Hauser, Jean Grosset, Isabelle Rufin
Production: Nord-Ouest Films, France 3 Cinéma
Distribution: New visions
Length: 113 minutes
FSK: from 12 years
Start: April 25, 2019

It is no coincidence that "strike" bears witness to parallels to Brizé's 2015 film "The Value of Man" ("La loi du marché"), with which the Frenchman was first represented in the Cannes competition. Vincent Lindon, the best performer, was named Thierry Taugourdeau, and at the age of fifty he had already experienced what Laurent Amédéo was so afraid of: job loss in the midst of infinite space to retirement.

Brizé showed this siding (from which Taugourdeau should be retrained by retraining) as a less than auspicious place. And it seems that it is precisely this knowledge that Amédéo uses to enter this battle, which is about much more than just individual protection. Amédéo demands the restoration of the dignity of the employee.

For this, the entire repertoire of the workers' struggle is boiled down: trade unions appear (and get in the way), strike actions and solidarizations with other works are organized ("Hold on, comrades, and do not take any lubricant if you put the fist in the bastards rammed the ass. ")

Of course, there is also a boss - the CEO of the Dimke Group, Martin Hauser, who, when finally seen, talks in perfect French about the film's key phrase in the tense Amédéo and Co mines: "Who the reality in this market? does not want to admit that actually requires to live in another world. "

In the video: The trailer for "strike"

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New visions

How far (or near) this other world is, Stéphane Brizé has no answer to that. But he does reveal a great empathy for that state of emergency, which reaches people who want to be more than "adjustment variables of shareholders". The decision to occupy "strike", with the exception of Vincent Lindon, exclusively with laymen, suggests that the director is not just a story - but us.