Bread From the Holy Land

I would like to spend time in Israel someday out of respect to the holiness of the land and what it has represented to man throughout history, and also out of a sense of adventure. I admire people that live in the Middle East, Jew, Christian, and Muslim. That land requires a lot of faith and courage.

The Human Resources Manager tells the story of one man, living and working at the largest bakery in Jerusalem. He is unnamed, and known only by the roles that he plays, HR boss, father, and estranged husband. A suicide bombing takes place and one of his employees is killed. She is a foreigner, and her body had been lying in the morgue unclaimed for days.

When a journalist reports on the situation as a human rights abuse, it falls on the human resource manager to make good on the bakery’s behalf. This means tracking down the dead woman’s family, transporting the body, and realizing their wishes for it.

Most of the scenes in the film have very interesting backgrounds. The night drive around Jerusalem was cool, from the twinkling lights in the hills, to the random a-- police checkpoint along the way. The police men pull people over just to look inside their cars over there. Something to think about.

The second half of the movie has an army bunker and a loaned six-wheeled armored vehicle and the Romanian countryside as the background. That was pretty cool.

Something happened that was very unfortunate at my Monday screening of the film at the Living Room Theaters. In a scene where the protagonist is receiving instructions from his boss concerning burial arrangements, the subtitles go away. For about three minutes, I witnessed a conversation in Hebrew without translation. It wasn’t fun and I lost crucial information from the movie. It took me almost to the end to realize the setting had changed to Romania.

While I'm on the subject of subtitles, I have a problem with featuring three or more languages in one film without distinguishing which language was spoken in the subtitles. I would have liked brackets enclosing the language being spoken under the translations. It was hard to distinguish when the characters (most of whom spoke two or more languages in the film) understood each other without guidance. Sadly, I can’t tell the difference between Romanian and Hebrew.

I guess I have to blame the distributor, but I realize the limitations in distributing a film to a worldwide audience from outside of the Hollywood system (According to the end credits, this film was at least partially funded by the Israel Film Fund.)

The Human Resources Manager was Israel’s bid for best foreign film in this year’s Academy Awards. I give the film a B-. The locations are outstanding. The story is simple but full of quirky twists and the level of production was very high. I enjoyed it.