Amos Gitai () is an Israeli artist and 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.
Between 1999 and 2017 eleven 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, Hana Laszlo, Yael Abecassis, Samuel Fuller, Hanna Schygulla, Annie Lennox, Rosamund Pike, Barbara Hendricks, Léa Seydoux, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Irene Jacob, Henri Alekan, Mathieu Amalric, Pippo Delbono Renato Berta, Nurith Aviv, Éric Gautier and more. Since 2000 he has been collaborating with the French screenwriter Marie-José Sanselme.
He has received several awards, including the Roberto Rossellini Prize (2005), the Leopard of Honor at the Locarno International Film Festival (2008), the Robert Bresson Prize (2013), the Paradjanov Prize (2014), and the Lucchino Visconti Prize (2021). He is a Commander des Arts and Letters and a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (2017). In 2018, Amos Gitai was elected professor of artistic creation at the Collège de France, with a series of nine lectures on cinema, followed by a symposium.
Amos Gitai has been working for approximately 40 years. His work also includes video installations, theatre productions and books. While the work is indeed varied, this diversity is extremely coherent. Over the years, Amos Gitaï articulates and re-articulates works which never cease to respond to and echo each other. He continues to explore new narrative and stylistic avenues, always in relation to contemporary reality, even when the narrative takes a detour into the historical or mythological past.
Amos Gitai has often spoken about the civic role of artists in society: "Sometimes art acts with a delay, preserving memory, the memory that those in power would like to erase because they call for obedience and do not want to be disturbed, they do not want dissent. But if artists remain true to their inner voice, they produce work that travels through time."In Amos Gitai, architecte de la mémoire, Gallimard/Cinémathèque française, 2014, p. 178.
Early life 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. 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.
Film career Gitai began his career directing mostly documentaries. In 1980 he directed his first full-length film House, which 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.
The film was rejected and censored by Israeli television, an event which marked the filmmaker's conflictual relationship with the authorities of his country. It was to make this film exist despite the censorship and to continue along the path he had just begun, that he said at that time: "I decided to become a filmmaker". This relationship was soon to be fueled by the controversy surrounding his film Field Diary, made before and during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and resulting in a long exile in France (1983–1993).
House was the first part of a trilogy including the films A House in Jerusalem (1998), and News from Home / News from House (2005). It was the first of many trilogies; a concept Gitai consistently worked with during his career, offering a complex and layered view of the geopolitical Israeli reality.
To his biographical elements (his family origins, the generation to which he belongs, his architectural studies, the making of the House and its effects) must be added the experience of the Yom Kippur War, in which he nearly died at the age of 23, and which would shape all his subsequent work. The traumatic event itself became the subject of a series of experimental short films and documentaries, before he directed Yom Kippur in 2000. The film's positive reception at the Cannes Film Festival brought him widespread recognition and confirmed his place as a major voice in world cinema. The way this intimate yet collective experience is rendered through a striking visual sensibility is characteristic of Gitai's approach. The film also marks the beginning of his long collaboration with screenwriter Marie-José Sanselme, which has continued to the present day.
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.
His third trilogy deals with Israeli political-military practices (Field Diary, 1982; Giving Peace a Chance, 1994; The Arena of Murder, 1996). Yann Lardeau wrote about Field Diary: He continued 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). In addition he made 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).
He then devoted a diptych to his parents, with the first film Carmel (2009), 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.
Gitai conducts tireless research on aesthetic means, which is anchored in the experimental uses of the camera from adolescence, and goes through the assertive stylisation of early fiction under the claimed influence of Bertolt Brecht and expressionism, as well as through the search for filming devices adapted to particular projects. One of the stylistic figures most willingly employed by Amos Gitai is the sequence shot, the long duration of the recording being used for multiple purposes never limited to visual seduction, but always in search of meaningful effects. A committed artist, Gitai is also the inventor of unexpected dramatic structures, such as the asymmetrical doubling of Berlin-Jerusalem, the spatial blocks of Alila or the temporal blocks of One day you'll understand (2008), the destabilizing fluidity of the Promised Land, the critical superimpositions of The Arena of Murder and Free Zone, to the abruptly broken-in-two narrative of Disengagement (2007) or the single 81-minute sequence shot of Ana Arabia (2013), which depicts a moment in the life of a small community of Jewish and Arab outsiders on the outskirts of Jaffa.
35 years after Field Diary (1982), Gitai returned to the West Bank with West of the Jordan River (2017), which describes the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians today. A tribute to those, "civilian or military, known or anonymous, who, in Israel, have not renounced reconciliation with the Palestinians", the film is presented in the Directors' Fortnight13 at the Cannes Film Festival.
2018 was an active year for Amos Gitai, when he was invited by the Venice Mostra to present two films in the competition of the Venice Film Festival. A Tramway in Jerusalem (2019) is a themed comedy that humorously observes moments of daily life on the Jerusalem tramway. The film stars 36 Israeli actors Yaël Abecassis, Hanna Laszlo, singer Noa Achinoam Nini, Palestinians and Europeans Mathieu Amalric and Pippo Delbono. On this tramway line that connects several neighborhoods in Jerusalem, from east to west, recording their variety and differences, this comedy humorously looks at moments in the daily lives of a few passengers.
The film is preceded by Amos Gitai's A Letter to a Friend in Gaza (2018, 34 mins, in Hebrew & Arabic), which responds to the current crisis between Israel and Gaza. Tao Palestinians and two Israelis read texts inspired by Mahmoud Darwish, Yizhar Smilansky, Emile Habibi and Amira Hass, as an homage to a famous letter written by Albert Camus in 1943, which gives its title to the film.
Gitai works on Rabin
In 2015, his film The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin was presented in competition at the Venice Mostra and then at the Toronto International Film Festival. Twenty years after the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister by a religious right-wing student on November 4, 1995, in Tel Aviv, Gitai looks back on this traumatic event. Placing the assassination in its political and social context, Yitzhak Rabin's Last Day mixes fictional reconstructions and archival footage in this political thriller that is also about the growing crisis in contemporary Israeli society.
Continuing his reflection on how art can reflect a historical event, Amos Gitai has also created in 2016 an exhibition/installation, Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination. It was presented first at the Maxxi Museum, Rome, under the title 'Chronicle of an Assassination Foretold', then at the BOZAR Museum in Brussels and at the Collection Lambert in Avignon (spring/summer 2016). Ceramics, photographs, video installations and archival documents take up space to offer a new reading of the events leading up to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.