DRAMA; 1hr 43min (Hebrew with subtitles)
STARRING: Mark Ivanir, Guri Alfi, Noah Silver
Boxed in: Ivanir (with a photo of Ozerner)
When is a job not just a job? For the human-resources manager (Ivanir) of Jerusalem’s biggest bakery, that transition is beyond his control after a suicide bomber kills a bakery employee. Separated from his wife and in a job that does nothing for him, the unnamed and careworn manager can’t remember staff member 565, General Cleaning’s Yulia Petracke (Galina Ozerner). But with her body unclaimed in the morgue and a local newspaper article accusing the bakery of “criminal neglect and lack of humanity,” he is saddled with the sad responsibility of escorting Yulia’s coffin to her mother’s village in Romania.
This isn’t a simple journey from director Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree). Metres of red tape complicate it, along with Yulia’s feral son (Silver) and the meddlesome reporter whose accusatory article kick-started the PR nightmare (Alfi). It’s a long way to travel, and further still for the human-resources manager, for whom the journey is also an awakening. Wry, bizarre, touching and affirming, it’s about coming together to do what is right when everything around you has begun to fall apart.
