Synopsis
Filmmaker Talya Lavie steps into the spotlight with a dark comedy about everyday life for a unit of young female Israeli soldiers. The human resources office at a remote desert base serves as the setting for this cast of characters, who bide their time pushing paper, battling for the top score in Minesweeper, and counting down the minutes until they can return to civilian life. Amidst their boredom and clashing personalities, issues of commitment—from friendship to love and country—are handled with humor and sharp-edged wit.
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Cast
- Dana IvgyZohar
- Nelly TagarDaffi
- Shani KleinRama
- Heli TwitoLivnat
- Meytal GalLiat
- Tamara KlingonIrena
- Yonit TobiTehila
- Yuval SegalBoaz - The base commander
- Elad SemamaMeir
- Moshe AshkenaziEitan
Recommendations
- 91
The Playlist
An absorbing office saga and diverting dark comedy, Zero Motivation is a surprisingly insightful coming-of-age tale, utilizing the milieu of the military to look at desire, loneliness, identity, fitting in and many aspects of everyday complex female life. - 90
Village Voice
Zero Motivation opens as bleak, rebellious comedy but grows into a smart and moving story of entering adulthood. - 88
RogerEbert.com
Like classic military comedies from “Catch-22” to “M*A*S*H,” Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation offers its own appealing blend of irreverence and absurdism. - 80
The Guardian
Zero Motivation is a shot of honesty, in which short-term goals are far more important than larger geo-political ones. Perhaps because they are the only ones over which we have any control. - 75
The A.V. Club
Melancholy climactic trajectory aside, Zero Motivation is primarily very funny. - 70
Variety
Beneath the strings of gags and wisecracks run parallel threads of ruthlessness and hysteria which bring “Motivation” a little closer to “Full Metal Jacket” than “Private Benjamin” as off-screen conflicts invade the closed-in encampment. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
Comic subplots are less zany than flatly hopeless, occasionally acting as deflating metaphors for army life. - 70
The Dissolve
Zero Motivation never stops being sharply funny, and there’s scarcely a hint of didacticism in its depiction of female soldiers who are essentially treated as a secretarial pool, so bored that they have to invent tasks to perform and create melodrama from scratch.
