Noam Kaplan

An intelligent social issues drama, Manpower sketches a portrait of four men in crisis. Moving between scathing realism and subtle irony, the film raises questions of belonging and uprooting, exile and emigration, home and family. Meir Cohen is a decorated police officer yet he barely earns a living. His new assignment to deport African migrant workers teaches him that foreigners aren’t the only ones with no future in his country. Other plotlines intertwine with Meir’s story: an Israeli-Filipino boy fighting for recognition; a taxi driver whose children are migrating to a distant country; and a veteran migrant worker who’s forced to decide whether to leave or to hide until trouble passes.

At 42 Dr. Bloch, a profiler, wants a child. A future. Her only way is to find a surrogate mother. At the same time, her groundbreaking algorithm designed to identify individuals planning to carry out terror attacks fails and a young Palestinian woman assassinates the Israeli minister of Space and Tourism. In order to ‘fix the bugs’ in her algorithm, Nurit faces the assassin in person. The sessions between these two brilliant women raise questions about their past, while the sessions between Bloch and the potential surrogate challenge Bloch’s decision about her future.

The first ever Israeli documentary film to feature an Arab protagonist is revisited 50 years later by top graduates of the Sam Spiegel Film School.

Eitan Kalish is a fictitious character of a student documentary film. A small -time friendly ecstasy deal he sets up unexpectedly goes to distance, when the Israeli Defense Forces are re-occupying Palestinian land, causing 1000 pills to fall into his lap. He sets up the ultimate poetic statement: selling the pills in the coming "Anti Occupation Rave" in Tel Aviv.