Nelly Tagar in Talya Lavie's movie 'Zero Motivation,' which looked critically and comically at the roles offered to women in the army (photo credit: Courtesy Match Factory)
The Israeli film “Zero Motivation” on Thursday took home top accolades in the form of the Best Narrative Feature prize at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
The film, a modestly budgeted comic take on boredom and postponed dreams among young women in the Israeli Defense Forces, also nabbed the festival’s Nora Ephron Prize.
“Zero Motivation” is the debut feature-length effort for writer-director Talya Lavie.
“With a script that is extremely funny and a little bit sad, ‘Zero Motivation’ walks a fine line between wacky farce and the brutal realism of the mundane,” The Times of Israel’s film writer Jordan Hoffman wrote in a piece about the film this week.
“Individual moments have the ring of specificity and truth, but the characters are wonderfully universal. With some good marketing and a little bit of luck this could be the most successful Israeli film in a generation,” he wrote.
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Writer/director Talya Lavie at the Tribeca Film Festival, April 2014 (photo credit: Jordan Hoffman/Times of Israel)
“I came to the army so serious, but there was a sense of absurd,” Lavie said in an interview with Hoffman. “With this film, I wanted to show the silly things.
“Maybe that’s a way to deal with this situation. The part of them doing those nonsense games is a serious part in the film.”
Each of the two Tribeca festival awards carries a $25,000 cash prize.
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