Amos Gitai

Gitai was born in Haifa on October 11, 1950, to the architect Munio Weinraub and the teacher Efratia Margalit.[1] His father had studied at the Bauhaus and died when Amos was twenty.[6] At the age of ten, Gitai spent a year living on a kibbutz in northern Israel after his parents sent him there.[7] Displacement, exile, and rootlessness would become recurring concerns in his films.[7]

Following his father’s profession, Gitai studied architecture at the Technion in Haifa before continuing his education at the University of California, Berkeley.[7] He completed his doctorate in architecture at Berkeley in 1979.[6] He later recalled spending nine years studying architecture before deciding to pursue cinema.[7] His movement toward film nevertheless began while he was still a student: he made short films in his early twenties at the Technion and began making documentaries while studying in the United States during the 1970s.[6][2]

Architecture remained an explicit point of reference in his account of filmmaking rather than simply a profession he had left behind.[7] Explaining his approach to narrative cinema, he said, “I look for allegorical structures and archetypes.”[7] His interest in form, spatial organization, and style continued into his film work, which would employ long takes, moving cameras, and extended passages without cuts.[6][8] Gitai is married to comparative-literature scholar Revka Gitai, and they have two children.[7]

When the Yom Kippur War began in 1973, Gitai was twenty-two and beginning his second year of architecture studies at the Technion, having previously served in the IDF’s Egoz unit.[3][7] He interrupted his studies to serve in a rescue unit during the war.[1] Together with a childhood friend, he joined an improvised helicopter rescue team and spent five days evacuating wounded soldiers.[3] During this service, he filmed brief scenes with a Super 8 camera his mother had given him, capturing fragments of the experiences around him rather than undertaking a completed feature production.[1][3]

On October 11, his twenty-third birthday, the helicopter was hit while on a mission to rescue a pilot in Syrian territory.[3][7] The damaged aircraft reached Israeli territory and crash-landed; Gitai and other wounded crew members were subsequently rescued and hospitalized.[3][7] He did not return to the front.[3] The experience became central to his later autobiographical filmmaking, although he initially wanted to put it behind him rather than turn it into a film.[3]

For years, even some close friends did not know what he had experienced, and he only later began writing about it.[9] Gitai described surviving the missile strike as a reason to live according to his own convictions and identified his wartime use of the camera as the beginning of his creation of cinematic images.[9] His return to the subject eventually took two forms: the 1997 documentary Kippur, War Memories, featuring interviews with surviving members of the rescue team, and the feature Kippur in 2000.[3] The feature appeared twenty-seven years after the war and was loosely based on his own experience.[3][9]

In 1980, Gitai directed House (Bait), a full-length documentary made for Israeli television about a house in West Jerusalem and Palestinians’ attachment to their land.[1] It became the first installment of a trilogy returning to the same house, establishing an approach in which one location could sustain a continuing documentary investigation.[1] Israeli television refused to broadcast the film.[1] Trilogies later recurred in his feature work as well.[7][10]

Gitai first came to prominence with Field Diary in 1982.[4] Made as Israel was mobilizing for the invasion of Lebanon, it included interviews with Palestinians about their circumstances.[6] The film addressed the effects of the occupation and included footage from the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — as well as Gaza and Beirut during the First Lebanon War.[11] His early documentary practice thus brought together interviews, particular places, and the immediate circumstances of conflict.[6][11]

During the 1980s, Gitai moved to Paris, where he continued making documentaries and began directing feature films.[2] He remained in France for roughly a decade and made a film each year during that period.[6] His work expanded to include feature films based on historical events and adaptations of Israeli literature, alongside his continuing documentary production.[1] Esther, his first full-length feature, was presented at Cannes and began the trilogy he called “Exile.”[1]

Berlin Jerusalem (1989) followed friends in Germany in the 1920s who move to Palestine.[2] It represented Israel at the Venice Film Festival and received the festival’s critics’ prize.[2][10] Gitai returned to Israel during the 1990s and continued working in both documentary and narrative forms.[7][2] By that decade, he had become a central figure in Israeli filmmaking, with work moving between close attention to contemporary life and explorations of the country’s turbulent history.[4]

His documentary subjects also included the mixed population of a poor Haifa neighborhood in The Wadi, which he later updated.[12] The film addressed the lives of people whose circumstances placed them outside the mainstream of Israeli society.[12] That attention to a particular community continued in later films, including work on Arab-Jewish life and on Israeli social groups that had received comparatively little screen attention.[4][13]

Following his return to Israel, Gitai made a city trilogy consisting of Devarim, also called Things, Yom Yom, and Kadosh, with each film dedicated to a different Israeli city.[7][10] Yom Yom (1998) centered on Haifa, while Kadosh (1999) was set in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Mea She’arim neighborhood.[7][2] These films formed part of his sustained attention to contemporary Israeli life, alongside a separate line of historical filmmaking.[4]

Kadosh examines intimate life in an ultra-Orthodox community through two sisters and a marriage under religious and familial pressure.[2][14] Adapted from Éliette Abécassis’s novel La Répudiée, its central marital story turns on a rabbi instructing a young husband to end his marriage because his wife has not conceived.[15] The couple have remained childless after ten years together, and the husband, expected to succeed his father as a rabbinic leader, is pressured to divorce and remarry.[6]

The film brought Gitai significant attention within Israel and returned Israeli cinema to Cannes’s official competition after a twenty-five-year absence.[6][9] Its audience differed markedly between Israel and France: approximately 20,000 people saw it in Israel, compared with 250,000 tickets sold in France during its first two months there.[7] It was followed by further films investigating particular social environments, including Alila (2003), which focused on Tel Aviv’s Sephardic working class.[4]

Gitai’s historical fiction trilogy comprised Kippur, Eden, and Kedma.[10] Released in 2000, Kippur drew on his memories of helicopter rescue service during the Yom Kippur War and screened in competition at Cannes.[1] Its story follows friends who rush to join their reserve unit, discover that it has already departed, and instead join a helicopter rescue squad evacuating the dead and wounded.[16] Rather than concentrating primarily on conventional combat, the film emphasizes confusion, interrupted ordinary pursuits, and the alternation between commitment, tedium, frustration, fear, and disillusionment.[4][16]

Eden followed in 2001, and Kedma in 2002.[2] Kedma examines the arrival of Jewish immigrants in Palestine immediately before the establishment of Israel.[2] Its narrative concerns a ship reaching the country shortly before the end of the British Mandate and the declaration of the state, with some of the survivors subsequently drawn into the fighting of the War of Independence.[9] Like Kippur, it revisits a historical turning point with an effort to give the past the immediacy of contemporary experience.[4]

Free Zone (2005) follows three women, played by Hanna Laslo, Natalie Portman, and Hiam Abbass, whose lives intersect on a journey toward a free-trade zone.[8] Gitai recalled that the opening image of Portman crying in a stationary car was not scripted but emerged spontaneously during a rainy, melancholy day of filming near the Western Wall.[8] The film competed at Cannes, where Laslo received the Best Actress Award, becoming the first Israeli actress to receive that honor.[2][8]

Ana Arabia follows a young journalist visiting a small Arab-Jewish community in Jaffa and was filmed in a single take lasting eighty-one minutes.[13] Gitai connected the project to three decades of documentary work concerning a community in which Arabs and Jews lived side by side.[13] The film competed for the Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Film Festival, following a retrospective of his work there the previous year.[17] At Venice, it received the SIGNIS Award and the Green Drop Award, while Gitai also received the Robert Bresson Award in 2013.[17]

For Rabin, The Last Day (2015), Gitai combined historical fiction with professional and amateur archival footage to reconstruct events surrounding the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.[10] The production used a large local cast with approximately seventy speaking roles and included a reconstruction of proceedings associated with the subsequent Shamgar Commission of Inquiry.[10] Gitai described the film as “a portrait of Israeli society at that time” and said his interest lay more in the incitement to kill Rabin than in concentrating attention on the assassin.[10]

The film drew on transcripts of the 1996 Shamgar Commission, which examined whether security measures could have prevented the assassination.[6] The commission found fault with intelligence agencies, police, and Rabin’s bodyguards, but its mandate did not extend to investigating the broader conditions that some believed had contributed to the murder.[6] Gitai’s film placed the commission’s proceedings alongside archival material and dramatized events rather than relying on a single mode of historical presentation.[6][10]

Thirty-five years after Field Diary, Gitai revisited Israeli-Palestinian relations in West of the Jordan River.[11] The documentary brought together Israeli and Palestinian civilians and moved between the contemporary situation and the Oslo period, including Gitai’s 1994 journey to Gaza.[11] Its material included meetings between bereaved mothers from both sides, conversations with politicians and media figures, and previously unseen extracts from an interview with Rabin recorded months before his assassination.[11]

Gitai called West of the Jordan River “a civic act,” explaining that he made it as an Israeli citizen dissatisfied with events around him.[11] He said that people whose views he opposed, including politicians interviewed for the film, should have the opportunity to articulate their arguments without being interrupted or manipulated through editing.[11] He described the resulting film as “a collection of contradictions” and rejected simplistic, linear accounts.[11]

Shikun, also released under the Hebrew title Still Not Late, premiered outside competition at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival.[18] It was filmed in the quarter-kilometer residential building known as Shikun Reva Ha-kilometer, a planned, enclosed housing complex built in the 1960s.[18] The project linked architectural space with contemporary political concerns, bringing his interest in buildings and social organization into the same film.[18]

Also in 2024, Why War screened out of competition at the Venice Film Festival.[19][20] The film was inspired by correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud concerning the prevention of war.[19] In a 2025 interview, Gitai explained that Einstein’s question about the inability to resolve conflict without war, together with Freud’s response about human psychology, had prompted him to explore the problem through cinema.[19]

Long takes, camera movement, and the avoidance of cuts are prominent features of Gitai’s filmmaking, connected to his architectural training and interest in continuous space and time.[8] The single eighty-one-minute shot of Ana Arabia is a particularly sustained example of that approach.[13] His own description of seeking “allegorical structures and archetypes” likewise places the organization of a narrative alongside the events it depicts.[7]

The architectural connection extended beyond his work on screen: his Tel Aviv apartment was designed without doors, and he described it as having been built “in one shot.”[8] He treated filmmaking as an experiment and said that negative reviews did not trouble him personally when a project departed from established conventions.[8] At the same time, his account of the unplanned opening of Free Zone shows that his working method could accommodate a moment arising spontaneously during production rather than adhering exclusively to a predetermined script.[8]

Gitai’s films repeatedly move between a specific locality and a larger historical or social concern. That pattern appears in the West Jerusalem house films and the residential complex of Shikun.[1][18] It also shapes his portraits of a mixed Haifa neighborhood and a small Arab-Jewish community in Jaffa.[12][13] Trilogies provide another recurring organizational form. The West Jerusalem house films and the “Exile” cycle established the pattern.[1] He later made the city trilogy and a historical-fiction trilogy.[7][10] Across documentary and fiction, his subjects include Jewish history, crises in Israel, the Israeli-Arab conflict, and Holocaust memory in Europe.[1][2]

Gitai’s work has received major institutional retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center in New York, and the British Film Institute in London.[1] Retrospectives included the Centre Pompidou presentation in 2003, Lincoln Center in 2005, and programs at the Berlin and Venice film festivals.[7][17] At least ten of Gitai’s films have competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.[1] These presentations accompanied a career in which his films repeatedly appeared at major international festivals and received awards.[2]

His honors include a French Order of Arts and Letters distinction and the Italian Roberto Rossellini Lifetime Achievement Award.[7] He served on the Venice Film Festival jury in 2005 and was selected in 2019 to preside over the jury for Cannes’s Clapperboard Citizens award, recognizing a film celebrating secular, universal, and humanist values.[7][21] His festival record includes the Venice critics’ prize for Berlin Jerusalem, the Cannes acting award for Laslo in Free Zone, and the Venice awards for Ana Arabia.[2][17]

Critical reception has varied across individual films.[4] Kippur was considered one of the strongest Israeli films of its era, while Kedma, Alila, and Free Zone received less favorable reviews.[4] Kedma also elicited differing responses internationally, with French and Italian critics praising it and American critics responding more cautiously.[9] Despite those differences, Gitai’s varied body of work became an inspiration for a generation of younger filmmakers.[4]

Beyond directing, Gitai has written several books and founded the Munio Gitai Weinraub Museum of Architecture in Haifa to commemorate his father’s architectural work.[5] His archive at the National Library of Israel covers 1980–2012 and comprises eight meters of material in Hebrew, English, and French.[5] It contains drafts, written scenes, and other documents used in writing and directing his films, preserving a record of the textual work behind his screen productions.[5]

The refusal of Israeli television to broadcast House became an early point of controversy in Gitai’s career.[1] Television also declined to broadcast Political Myths, concerning the Masada myth.[7] His years in France generated competing interpretations: French press accounts sometimes presented him as a political exile, while some Israeli commentators argued that this image helped market his films.[7] His generally left-wing perspective and stronger reception abroad than at home also formed part of the political debate around his work.[2]

Kadosh prompted criticism and discussion of its representation of ultra-Orthodox society.[14] A Mosaic commentary interprets the film as a forceful attack on that society, calling its portrait “corrosive, furious, and ultimately damning,” and reads its characters as conveying Gitai’s opposition to ultra-Orthodox values.[14] The commentary also quotes his statement at the time that, “In Israel, Judaism has become a Church.”[14]

Political opposition continued to accompany later projects: Gitai resisted calls to boycott Why War around its 2024 Venice screening.[20] The episode extended the public controversy surrounding a filmmaker whose work had repeatedly addressed Israeli religion, war, political violence, and Israeli-Palestinian relations.[20]