Time
of Favor takes place in a Jewish settlement on the
West Bank, where Rabbi Meltzer (played by Assi Dayan) runs
a yeshiva. Meltzer’s lectures incite soldiers to act
to regain the Temple Mount for the Jewish people. However,
the form of action he recommends is nonmilitary, that is,
to have thousands of Jews praying at the site. Meanwhile,
he wants his daughter Michal (played by Tinkerbell) to marry
his best Torah student, a nerd nicknamed Pini (played by Edan
Alterman), but she does not want to be a commodity and prefers
handsome Menachem (played by Aki Avni), who is the commander
of the army unit in the settlement whose members are students
at the yeshiva. As the love triangle plays out, Pini is the
loser, so he reacts by persuading fellow soldier Itamar (played
by Micha Selektar) to steal explosives on the pretext that
a big explosion has been ordered by both Rabbi Meltzer and
Menachem. Going into an underground tunnel that extends from
the settlement toward the Temple Mount, Pini kills Itamar
and is prepared to blow himself up in order to make a political
statement. Meanwhile, Israeli authorities are watching Rabbi
Meltzer, whom they consider dangerous. When Michal gets wind
of a plot of some sort, Menachem is arrested in an effort
to find out about the plan. Menachem, however, knows nothing.
After being slapped a lot during interrogation, he volunteers
to talk Pini out of the suicide bomb plot, and then enters
the tunnel to save the day. Joseph Cedar, director of Time
of Favor, was doing research on the story when a religious
fanatic from one of the settlements assassinated Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin during a peace rally on November 5, 1995. Film
shooting stopped in May 2000, and production work ended just
before Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount with
his cronies on September 28, 2000. Sharon’s stunt, of
course, served to provoke the second Intifada, which continues
to escalate to this day. Thus, Time of Favor serendipitously
links Sharon’s ill-conceived visit with the extremist
politics of the West Bank settlers, so the film can be viewed
as a plea for a more peaceful approach to the conflict between
Israelis and Palestinians. Accordingly, the Political Film
Society has nominated Time of Favor as best
film on peace of 2002. MH
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