Strive.

Perfect Smile. Perfect dress. Perfect movements. No trace of pain, hard work or lack of strength: that is how ballet dancers present themselves to the audience. The perfect moment on stage is what they train for.
Claudia Ortiz Arraiza has made it her day to day business to strive for such perfection. She is one of 70 dancers at Munich State Ballet. Without a moment of hesitation she left her home Puerto Rico to become a professional dancer. Since Ballet is not just her profession but her life, she deals with it on a philosophical level, too.
Sometimes in life, when things seem really hard, she asks herself why she is doing this. Striving for perfection is hard. But watching her dance, you will immediately know that her profession is her passion and has been for all her life. Her instrument is her body no matter where she is. Home is, where the bar is.
Strive. allows a poetic look behind the stage of an internationally renown Opera and Ballet and accompanies a young woman, who is striving for perfection yet knows she will never really achieve that: something is beautiful, because it is not there forever.

For one week DOP Adrian Langenbach and Director Jutta Schoen followed Claudia Ortiz Arraiza at her workplace with 16 hour workdays lasting from morning warm up till after the show at midnight. No more then one day off per week. Such a schedule hardly leaves time for anything besides dancing. The Opera is the center of her life and the center of the film.