The Human Resources Manager

Off the beaten track, and then some
Let me state upfront that I am a big fan of Film Movement, which releases foreign and indie movies to the US on DVD which otherwise would never get a chance to find an audience here.

"The Human Resources Manager" (2010 release from Israel; 103 min.) is a rather strange, but ultimately appealing movie. The initial story line, set in Jerusalem 2002, centers on the fact that a female employee of a big bakery, working in Israel as a "guest worker" from Romania, died in one of the many suicide attacks that terrorized Israel at the time. Turns out that the woman had been let go from the bakery some weeks before that, without the bakery's top management knowing about it. An Israeli reporter turns the story into one of "inhuman indifference" and the company's HR manager is asked to look into it. At that point it looked like the movie might have a political take on the suicide bombings. Eventually, the company decides to pay for taking the woman's body back to Romania for a proper...

Israel, Romania, our hearts bleed until you show your true natures
THE HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR (2010, 103 minutes) is a somewhat stunning film in the sense that it is a small, intimate film about a huge trip, it is Israeli, and we hardly get to even hear of these films in the West.

This is set circa 2002, Jerusalem. A Romanian guest worker named Iulia (billed as "Yulia") is killed in a suicide bombing. An engineer, for some strange reason Yulia was working for a bakery as a janitor until she was fired about a month before the report of her death.

Then there seemed to have been some delay in even figuring out who she was - it apparently took some digging. That was because her boss had fallen in love with her. With no job, her boss saw to it she continued to receive a paycheck, and that is how the bakery she worked for identified her.

The Human Resources Director is compelled to go on a journey through Jerusalem's silly beaurocracy just to find out exactly who she was and what her work status was. I'm not sure the film...

A change in humanity
A Human Resource manager, only known to us by title, is pressured to deal with the death of a woman who worked at the large industrial bakery. Yulia Petracke, employed in the cleaning department is dead, and the victim of a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. And, the newspaper is intent on breaking the story how an employee can be dead for over a week in the morgue, and nobody from the company knows about it.

The H.R. Manager, with his own personal problems at home, divorced and with a daughter he doesn't spend much time with, is sent to make amends to the family and travels to Romania with the body, for burial. The newspaper reporter/photographer eager for the negativity for the story, makes the trip along with the dead woman's ex-husband. They soon reach the woman's 13 year old son, in all his bitterness and anger. The brown casket sits atop the traveling van. The journey has its catastrophes.

Billed as a tragicomedy or perhaps even black comedy, but you will...

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