Strike is a Polish language film produced by a mainly German group, released in 2006 and directed by Volker Schlndorff. 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 Gdask, 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 Gdask 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 Piekowska. Generally Agnieszka's life is based on Walentynowicz. However, it was Pienkowska who called Jacek Kuro in Warsaw to announce the strike, and she is generally credited with demanding "solidarity" at the shipyard gates to continue the strike.
