Amos Gitai (Hebrew: עמוס גיתאי) 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."
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.
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.
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 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:"(...) 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 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.