The Human Resources Manager (Eran Riklis, 2010): Israel, Germany, France, Romania

Reviewed by Emily Day at the AFI Film Festival, Hollywood

After a body is recovered and identified as one of the employees at a factory. The Human Resource Manager is forced to take ownership of the body until he can find the family and return the body to them. His journey begins in Israel where he searches for the reasons behind her death and then on  to the village where the woman was born in hopes of finding her family. In this beautiful tale, Eran Rikki explores the concept of death, love and what it means to be a family.

I viewed this film at the AFI Festival and after watching it, I could not get the cinematographic images out of my mind. This film was very impressive and quite possibly one of the best acted films I have scene in a long time. The plot is enjoyable and interesting and it is a story filled with characters that attract your interest and cause you to think. The culture of the film is what drives the audiences interest as the characters journey in search of the woman’s family. The setting and climate of the film cause you to feel the “coldness” of the film’s subject matter.

I think that Eran Riklis did an impeccable job tying everything together. Though this was a foreign film there was a fluidity to the pace which made watching with subtitles easy. I did not feel distracted in any way due to the subtitles. I enjoyed the experience of watching a film about a culture I knew very little about. I can remember walking out of the theater curious and excited because I had just seen such a beautiful display of a country that was very new to me. As I said earlier, the locations in the film were awe inspiring and captured in such a delicate way that  it made you feel familiar to it. I had never seen or experienced this in a film before.