Amos Gitai: A Director's Profile

Amos Gitai was born Amos Weinraub in 1950, just two years after the establishment of the state of Israel. He became Amos Gitai in his late adolescence when his father Hebraized the family's European name. After mandatory military service, Gitai followed his father's footsteps and studied architecture, first at the Technion Institute in Haifa, and then at the University of California-Berkeley in the United States

Gitai's studies were disrupted by the 1973 Yom Kippur War, an event that profoundly shaped his life and work. A helicopter in which he was serving on a search and rescue mission was shot down, killing people who were very close to him and nearly ending his own life. After this, Gitai gradually turned toward filmmaking, using a Super8 camera his mother had given him for his birthday. Gitai had brought the camera with him on several helicopter missions, though not the fateful one that ended in a crash. Intrigued by the immediacy filmmaking offered as opposed to the long-term commitments of architecture, he began making short, abstract films on Super8 and 16mm featuring landscapes and political rallies.

Since then, based alternately in Israel, the United States, and France, Gitai has produced an extraordinary, wide-ranging, and deeply personal body of work. In roughly 40 films, working in documentary, fictional, and historical modes, Gitai has explored the layers of history in the Middle East and beyond, including his own personal history, through such themes as homeland and exile, religion, social control, and utopia. Stylistically, these films are marked by presentational, "planimetric" long takes, scarce but significant camera movements, sound counterpoint, and a devilishly clever sense of humor.

In the late 70s and early 80s, Gitai directed numerous documentaries, some of them for Israeli television. Many, including House and Field Diary, were censored. During the same era, Gitai received his Ph.D. in architecture from the University of California-Berkeley, and directed several documentaries in and about the United States, such as In Search of Identity and American Mythologies.

Following the controversial reception of Field Diary, in 1983 Gitai moved to Paris, France, where he was based for approximately the next decade. During this period he continued directing documentaries. Several present international voyages, such as Pineapple, a humorous odyssey about the growth and marketing of pineapples, and Brand New Day, a rockumentary following musician Annie Lennox and the band the Eurythmics as they tour Japan. Some of the others deal with the resurgence of fascism in Europe, including In the Valley of the Wupper, set around a Neo-Nazi incident in Germany, and In the Name of the Duce, about Alessandra Mussolini's election campaign as part of the Neo-Fascist Party in Italy.

While based in Paris, Gitai also began directing fiction / history features about the experience of exile. These include a stunning adaptation of the Biblical book of Esther, presented in the Cannes Film Festival's Critics' Week; Berlin Jerusalem, a powerful historical epic about the emigration of European Jews to British mandate-era Palestine that won the critics' prize at the Venice Film Festival; and three films related to the Jewish legend of the Golem, including Birth of a Golem, Golem: The Spirit of Exile, and Golem: The Petrified Garden. In these films Gitai collaborated with an extraordinary range of talents, including the great French cinematographer Henri Alekan (Beauty and the Beast, Wings of Desire, and countless other acclaimed films), the German musicians Simon and Markus Stockhausen, producer Laurent Truchot (Yeelen), actors from the Peter Brook Company, and legendary American B-movie director Samuel Fuller (Shock Corridor), who performed as an actor.

In the mid 90s, following the election of Yitzhak Rabin, Gitai moved back to his hometown of Haifa. He continued to direct films at an astonishing rate. He initiated the fictional Cities trilogy, including Devarim, Yom Yom, and Kadosh (presented in competition at Cannes). He simultaneously created numerous documentaries, including A House in Jerusalem, which revisits the location of the film House, Wadi 1981-1991, which integrates the early film Wadi into a decade-spanning film, Give Peace a Chance, The Arena of Murder (concerning Rabin's assassination), War and Peace in Vesoul (co-directed with Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman), and Orange.

With the return to live in Israel, Gitai also returned to a moment that changed his life: being shot down during the Yom Kippur War. War Memories is a documentary that examines that moment; it served as something of a sketch for the large-scale historical fiction film Kippur.

Since Kippur, Gitai has remained very busy. He has completed two new feature-length films. Eden, a historical fiction film set between the U.S. and Palestine in the 1930s and drawing on the story of the Garden of Eden, is based on a story by Arthur Miller, who also co-stars. Wadi: 2001 (AKA Wadi: Grand Canyon), a documentary shot on video, is the third and probably final installment in the Wadi trilogy begun in 1981. Kedma, a historical film about the 1948 War is currently being released in the United States.