ZAMEK Culture Centre

Fren works in the HR department of a large Thai corporation whose management – invisible yet omnipresent – routinely abuses employees’ rights, subjecting them to aggression in a fashionable setting and within a seemingly dynamic team. She is given a morally ambiguous task: to hire someone who will accept mistreatment without protest. At the same time, she discovers she is pregnant – something unknown even to her partner, with whom her relationship is slowly dying.

In his most sombre film to date, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, a favourite of the Five Flavours audience, paints a picture of the corporate labyrinth with austere elegance, where human lives are treated as resources to be shifted and exploited. In the film’s constructed reality, whose title itself sounds like a painfully grating oxymoron, the director masterfully employs silence, repetitive gestures and minimalist narration to create an atmosphere of anxiety, as stifling and sterile as an open–plan office. It is both a satire on work culture and a poignant study of loneliness: subtle and sophisticated, resonating with Thailand’s fertility crisis and the oppression of everyday life. “Human Resource” leaves behind a sense of unease that lingers long after the screening.

HUMAN RESOURCE, dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, Thailand 2025, 122’