Amos Gitai

Amos Gitai is an artist and an Israeli filmmaker, born 11 October 1950 in Haifa, Israel.

Gitai's work was presented in several major retrospectives in Pompidou Center in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Lincoln Center in New York, and the British Film Institute in London.

To date, Amos Gitai has created over 90 works of art, including a wide variety of formats such as feature and short films, fiction and documentaries, experimental work, television productions, installations and theater works.

He graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1968.

He holds a degree in architecture from the Technion in Haifa and a PhD in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Gitai had to interrupt his architecture studies as he was called up to the reserve service as part of a helicopter rescue crew.

Gitai was wounded when the helicopter he was in was hit by a Syrian missile.

During his missions, he used a Super 8 camera to document the war.

After the war, he embarked on a career as a filmmaker and made his first documentary in 1980, House.

Gitai began his career directing mostly documentaries.

In 1980 he directed his first full-length film House, that follows a house in West Jerusalem, abandoned during the 1948 war by its Palestinian owner.

In the film, Gitai follows the different house tenants over the years, making the house the focus of the Israeli socio-political conflict.

It opens a democratic cinematic space around the same house where a split of perspectives on the situation and its history takes place.

"Gitaï wants this house to be both a symbol and something very concrete; he wants it to become a character in a film. He achieves one of the most beautiful things a camera can register 'live', as it were; people who look at the same thing but see different things – and who are moved by that vision. In this crumbling shell of a house, real hallucinations begin to take shape. The film's central idea is simple and the film has simply the force of that idea, no more, no less.'"

The film was rejected and censored by the Israeli television, an event which marks the filmmaker's conflictual relationship with the authorities of his country.

It is to make this film exist in spite of the censorship and to continue along the path he had just begun, that he says at that time: "I decided to become a filmmaker".

He continues with the making of the three Wadi (Wadi 1981, Wadi Ten Years After 1991, Wadi Grand Canyon 2001) which similar to House is dealing with a specific location and examines the complex relationships between the residents of the former stone quarry – Eastern European immigrants, survivors of the camps and Arabs who have also been expelled from their homes due to the wars in Israel.

Gitai turns the valley into a symbol of a possible coexistence.

This relationship was soon to be fueled by the controversy surrounding of his film Field Diary, made before and during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and resulting in a long exile in France (1983-1993).

His third trilogy deals with the Israeli political-military practices (Field Diary, 1982; Giving Peace a Chance, 1994; The Arena of Murder, 1996).

Yann Lardeau wrote about Field Diary:"'(...) We never go inside the reality of the war but always remain at the edge of the scene, on its tangent. The camera constantly glides over its subject without ever penetrating it, attacking it, like our eye on the surface of the screen, reproducing within the film our real situation as spectators. (...) Field Diary offers a civilian image of war, […] setting it apart from the rest of audio-visual production by its content as much as by its mode of operation, by the solution it offers to a problem that pertains to the ethics of the filmmaker as much as to the aesthetics of cinema'"

He continues with the making of the trilogy on the procedures of world capitalism (Pineapple, 1984; Bangkok-Bahrain/Labour for Sale, 1984; Orange, 1998) and the trilogy on the resurgence of the European extreme right (In the Wupper Valley, 1993; In the Name of the Duce/Naples-Rome, 1994; Queen Mary '87, 1995).

But also trilogies of fiction, trilogies of exile (Esther, 1985; Berlin-Jerusalem, 1989; Golem, the spirit of exile, 1991), trilogies of cities (Devarim, 1995; Yom Yom, 1998 ; Kadosh, 1999), trilogy of historical events decisive for Israel (Yom Kippur, 2000; Eden, 2001; Kedma, 2002 and trilogy of borders (Promised Land, 2004; Free Zone, 2005; Disengagement, 2007).

House was the first part of a trilogy including the films A House in Jerusalem (1998), News from Home / News from House (2005).

It was a first trilogy of many others; a concept Gitai consistently worked with during his career, offering a complex and layered view on the geopolitical Israeli reality.

To his biographical elements (his family origins, the generation to which he belongs, his architectural studies, the making of House and its effects) must be added the experience of the Yom Kippur War, in which he almost died at the age of 23, an experience that would influence all his future work.

Between 1999 and 2017 ten of his films participated in the Cannes Film Festival for the Palme d'Or as well as The Venice International Film Festival for the Golden Lion award.

He has worked with Juliette Binoche, Jeanne Moreau, Natalie Portman, Yael Abecassis, Samuel Fuller, Hanna Schygulla, Annie Lennox, Barbara Hendricks, Léa Seydoux, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Henri Alekan, Renato Berta, Nurith Aviv, Éric Gautier and more.

Since 2000 he has been collaborating with the French screenwriter Marie-José Sanselme.

The traumatic event itself is the focus of a series of experimental short films and documentaries, before directing the film Yom Kippur in 2000, which definitively consecrated its stature after its positive reception at the Cannes Film Festival.

The evocation of this intimate and common experience served by an impressive plastic sense is exemplary of Amos Gitai's art.

The film also marks the beginning of the director's collaboration with screenwriter Marie-José Sanselme that dates until today.

He received several prestigious prizes, in particular the Leopard of Honor at the Locarno International Film Festival (2008), the Roberto Rossellini prize (2005), the Robert Bresson prize (2013), the Paradjanov prize (2014) and Legion of Honour (2017).

He then devotes a diptych to his parents, with the first film Carmel (2009), which is an intimate reflection on the correspondence of his mother Efratia (Gallimard, 2010).

The second film Lullaby to my Father (2012) traces the journey of his father Munio Gitai Weinraub from

his childhood in Silesia, his Bauhaus studies with Mies van der Rohe and Hannes Meyer at the time of the rise to power and the conquest of power by the Nazis.

In 2018, Amos Gitai has been elected professor at the chair of artistic creation at the Collège de France, with a series of 12 lessons on cinema.

In 2019 he received the Grande Ufficiale dell'Ordine della Stella Italia.

His film Shikun (2024), starring Irène Jacob and Bahira Ablassi, was an official selection at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Gitai was born to Munio Weinraub, an architect formed at the pre-war German Bauhaus art school, and to Efratia Margalit, an intellectual, a storyteller and a teacher.