Time of Favor (Hahesder)

Winner of six Israeli Academy Awards including Best Picture, TIME OF FAVOR is a timely, compelling thriller about religious nationalist settlers who conspire to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque on the Temple Mount, which has become the quintessential symbol of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The story follows Menachem (Aki Avni, current Israeli heartthrob) an Orthodox army officer in the intensive hesder yeshiva program, which combines yeshiva study with service in a combat unit. His mentor is Rabbi Meltzer (veteran actor/director Asi Dayan), who preaches fanatically about the need for Jews to be able to return to pray on the Temple Mount. Menachem falls in love with Michal (the popular Israeli sensation Tinkerbell, also featured in TOTAL LOVE), the rabbi’s daughter, who has already been promised by her father to Menachem’s best friend Pini. As the love triangle evolves, so does a violent scheme to assume Jewish control of the Temple Mount. The stakes are high and Menachem’s allegiances are put to the test. Whose orders will he obey? TIME OF FAVOR is the work of an insider to the culture it portrays. Joseph Ceder was raised in an Orthodox home and lived for a year in a settlement on the West Bank. He based his characters on people he knows well. Messianic nationalist activism is a growing undercurrent in modern day Israel. The film is a study of the motivations behind a movement that is willing to take Israel to the brink.

Joseph Cedar was born in New York in 1968 and immigrated to Israel with his family at the age of six. The son of Tzippi and Howard Cedar (she a psychodrama therapist and he the 1999 winner of the Israeli Prize for his work in molecular biology), Cedar studied philosophy and theater history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is an NYU Film School graduate. TIME OF FAVOR is Cedar's first feature film. Cedar, a former infantry paratrooper with a yeshiva background, identified with this story on a very personal level. After three years of living on a settlement in Samaria, Cedar came to a moment that changed his life. While Israeli Independence Day celebrations were going on, he noticed that, unlike when he was a child, everyone was taking everything very seriously, in their uniforms, and he wondered where was the humor, where was the joy? From then on, his perspective changed. "I began thinking about the high price the younger generation is paying for their parents' adventure." While he retains his respect for the settlement movement, he has concluded that its willingness to suffer for the land of Israel blinds them, says the intense director, "in two ways. One is to their neighbors, the Palestinians. They think they're paying the price, but their neighbors are paying the real price for the occupation." The other blindness became the film's subject. "When you are swept up in a total conviction regarding your mission, and moral righteousness, the individual human being loses importance. What is the price an individual person should pay for the larger group?" He set out to write the story of a young man who sees himself as a patriotic national hero but then overnight turns into the public enemy as his religious affiliation is used against him. Cedar received a development grant from the Israel Film Fund and relocated to a settlement in the West Bank in order to research and write his screenplay. There, in an isolated caravan, with a bed, an electric heater, and a computer, TIME OF FAVOR was composed.