Filled with memorable characters and unpredictability, this Israeli road movie travels from Jerusalem to Bulgaria as an HR manager is forced to accompany the body of a dead co-worker to her isolated village.

One of the more ambitious Israeli films in years, The Human Resources Manager is a tender and darkly humorous story of personal redemption, told within the structure of an increasingly bizarre road movie. The quietly unhappy office manager of Jerusalem’s largest bakery finds his life in turmoil after one of his employees, a young female foreign worker, is killed in a suicide bombing. It soon became a PR scandal when newspapers report on the indifference of his company to her death. So the manager is directed to make a public gesture of grief and responsibility by taking her body back to her home village in rural Eastern Europe. What begins as a two-day trip turns into a confusing odyssey through a bureaucratic post-communist world. Along the way he meets a series of characters including the ex-husband of the deceased, her troubled teenage son, a weird Israeli consulate and strangely ominous soldiers. But that road also leads to something missing in the man’s life: compassion. One of the great discoveries in this International section. (Hebrew, English, Romanian with English subtitles) -- Raymond Murray