Ofir Raul Graizer | Tfilah Be Yanuar (A Prayer in January) / 2007

bread, love, and abandonment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ofir Raul Graizer (screenwriter and director) Tfilah Be Yanuar (A Prayer in January) / 2007 [12 minutes]

 

The short film was Ofir Raul Graizer’s senior film offering at Spair School of Film, long before he went on the make the remarkable feature The Cakemaker, ten years later (2017).

     Like his later film, however, this work is high nuanced and quite subtle, and also involves a lot of work on baking, in this case, despite it being Sabbath, a loaf of Challah, generally served on the Sabbath, and in this case for a small celebratory lunch with Yaron (Yaron Green) and his lover Nati (Ofer Regirer), his lover who has long lived with him on their farm in Israel.

    Although this beautiful loaf, made carefully from scratch by Yaron, is a gesture of love, the man himself is not at all happy when Nati arrives, ready to finally offer some help, Yaron arguing that he has never helped with anything before.

     As he endlessly kneads the dough into the proper elasticity, it is clear, in fact, that Yaron is angry, not only for all those days Nati has left him alone while working on his religious studies, but, in reaction, as we soon discover, for Nati’s decision to leave the farm and their almost paradisical relationship for further religious studies elsewhere. In short, he is abandoning, as certainly required, his loving gay relationship, in order to become a religious man.

    Yet this warm afternoon, he also wants once more time to share his love with Yaron, and almost forces himself on his friend who finally cannot resist abandoning himself to their sexual delights, before he moves the table on which he was made the bread into the sun with its flowering trees nearby, to share his final offering of their domestic life. Certainly, this early short work, , reveals, as critic David Hall points out in his review on Gay Celluloid “far more passion between them, than that of the gay relationship depicted in Graizer's impressive debut feature.”

    If you watch this film again after perceiving the story, the whole lovely sharing of the bread becomes an almost tear-jerking experience before Nati walks away, on his way to the nearest bus or trains station, one imagines, to take him away forever.

     When Nati leaves, Yaron puts on a recording of what might be the least expected song to record the sorrow of a Jewish boy, Schubert’s Ave Maria, perhaps one of the most Roman Catholic songs imaginable. But there Yaron is clearly an outsider in his sexual behavior from the Jewish community.

     In the distance, we see Nati walking on his way, but then suddenly stopping, pausing, and just perhaps deciding to turn back to love instead of walking away to his religious identity. We don’t know what his actual decision is. Graizer’s work is far too subtle to answer the pushes and pulls of this relationship, which after all clearly doesn’t eventually knead easily to an elastic relationship of chemicals. But the prayer is there, in the bright January Saturday sun of an Israeli settlement, where Yaron awaits just such a possible miracle of his lover’s change of mind to match his heart.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026