A Bonus For Irene

Irene Arndt is divorced, lives in a lousy flat with his two children and holds down a badly paid job in a washing machine factory. There's no room for self-pity, though, as she believes her well-being hinges on "a question of organisation" - not just of her own life, but of all women and all workers. An activist-artist, director Helke Sander Sander was part of the Action Council for the Liberation of Women, a group which helped setting up daycare centres for the children of working mothers. A Bonus For Irene is a cinematic equivalent to that struggle, as it charts its protagonist's fight in receiving fair treatment at home and at work. But the film’s hardly a polemic: humorous in her depiction of the tribulations of working-class women in a capitalist society, and hilarious in imagining what a "futuristic" factory would look like, Sander's film is a winner all around.