BRD 1975 | Director, Script: Ingemo Engström | Camera: Axel Block | Editor: Gerhard Theuring | Sound: Andreas Köbner | Production Manager: Tilman Taube | Music: Johann Sebastian Bach | Cast: Elisabeth Kreuzer, Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, Muriel Theuring, Monique Armand, Despina Papaioannu, Inge Flimm, Marie Bardischewski | Production: Ingemo Engström, Gerhard Theuring, Theuring-Engström-Filmproduktion (München) | Colour | DCP of 16mm | 135 min | german OV | Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek

Kampf um ein Kind („The Struggle for a Child“) examines the work and life situation of women who take on an additional job, namely that of having and raising a child. The film poses the question of how it might be possible to have a child without becoming unbearably dependent and without giving up one's work or having to entirely forego working in advance – because a woman's relationship to work is important to her existence (not just financially, as a means of survival, but as a purpose in life and a form of self-realisation). The film also asks how she might have a child without being relegated to a seemingly private sphere, and how these interests that are vital to women can be reconciled with the needs of a child. The film is also meant to show and to make tangible how the current convention of isolating the mother with her child also fails to meet the requirements of the child and the man.

Kampf um ein Kind is told from the perspective of a person in the film. Maria Mandelstam, a young doctor, paces through a pivotal chapter of her life, a time of growing awareness. The film begins with a separation and continues with an alien situation which she experiences tentatively. Maria takes her small child to southern Germany where she works in a large women's clinic. She discovers her field of work to be a hot spot where women's societal experiences are reproduced to a certain degree: their situation is one of subjugation. (Ingemo Engström)