A warehouse worker's fight for his colleagues collides with a much more private crisis in Our Struggles, Guillaume Senez's 2018 drama about a father left to raise two young children alone.
What is Our Struggles about?
Olivier spends his days organizing coworkers at a distribution warehouse against unfair treatment, certain of what he owes the people around him at work. That certainty collapses the night his wife, Laura, walks out and leaves him alone with their two children, ages nine and six. Guillaume Senez builds the film around the unglamorous mechanics of solo parenting — school runs, packed lunches, a job that does not pause for a family crisis — rather than around a search for Laura or an explanation for why she left. The labor dispute that opens the film keeps running in the background, so that Olivier's public fight for fairness plays out alongside a private one he has no idea how to win.
About the cast
Romain Duris carries the film as Olivier, playing a man more comfortable organizing a picket line than managing a school pickup. Laetitia Dosch appears as Laura, and Laure Calamy and Lucie Debay play women who step in to help hold the household together. Lena Girard Voss and Basile Grunberger play the two children at the center of the story, with Marc Robert and Dominique Valadié rounding out the cast.
Context & significance
Our Struggles is a Belgian-French co-production from 2018, and its French title, Nos Batailles, points to the double meaning Senez builds the film around: the labor battle Olivier fights at work and the quieter one he faces at home. The film keeps its focus tight and domestic, avoiding melodrama in favor of the accumulated small failures and small victories of a parent figuring things out in real time. Running 98 minutes, it favors observation over plot mechanics, tracking a household adjusting to an absence rather than building toward a single confrontation. Its Belgian and French settings and French-language dialogue give it a specific, unglamorous texture that keeps the family, not the workplace politics, at the center.
Watching Our Struggles on Ktime
Our Struggles streams on K-Time with a free account login, and its page is free to read without signing in. K-Time's Farsi interface lets Persian-speaking viewers browse, search, and manage their account in their own language, wherever they are watching from.