Zero Motivation

Talya Lavie's first feature is an Israeli black comedy about young women soldiers stationed in a human resources office at a remote desert base. Even their official titles are absurd: postal NCO and paper and shredding NCO. They spend their days carrying coffee, shredding documents and playing endless games of Minesweeper. The film is divided into three parts, and the friendship between Zohar and Daffi curdles in the third when Daffi returns as an officer, escalating into workplace sabotage and a duel fought with staple guns. Lavie served two years in the military after high school, far from any combat, in a posting made of petty bureaucracy and boredom, and the film draws directly on that. It won two major prizes at Tribeca, Best Narrative Feature and the Nora Ephron Award for a woman filmmaker with a distinctive voice, then took six of twelve nominations at Israel's Ophir Awards. With roughly five hundred ninety thousand admissions it became the most watched Israeli film of its year at home. Critics regularly placed it in the lineage of Catch-22 and MASH. Who it's for: Fans of black comedy that satirizes military bureaucracy from the inside and of women centered service narratives. Who it's not for: Not for viewers wanting action or combat, since the film stays in an office and takes boredom as its subject.