Amos Gitai

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.Gitai was born to Munio Weinraub,[3] an architect formed at the pre-war German Bauhaus art school, and to Efratia Margalit, an intellectual, a storyteller and a teacher.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.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).(...) 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).It's like a jigsaw puzzle, and even more like a kaleidoscope, voices mingle, and faces, Jeanne Moreau, Hanna Schygulla, damaged photos, memories, vestiges, the quest is all personal, it's precisely in this way that it becomes universal, associating relationship to one's land and its history (the Gitai family's journey is inseparable from the founding of the State of Israel), rootedness and vagrancy, attraction and repulsion.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.Twenty years after the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister by a religious right-wing student on 4 November 1995, in Tel Aviv, Gitai looks back on this traumatic event.It lacks, in particular, a political figure who would have the courage, I would even say the optimism, despite everything that is happening in the Middle East, to move forward, to reach out, to create a dialogue in this impossible world.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.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, brief encounters that reveal a whole mosaic of human beings.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.Over the years, travels, struggles, exile, encounters, Amos Gitaï articulates and re-articulates works which, in their shimmering, never cease to respond to and echo each other.[10][circular reference][11] Roses à crédit (2010) is an adaptation of the novel by Elsa Triolet and takes a look at the materialist, post-war world of the French lower middle-class.The journey Gitai offered is challenging and shaky, evoking the violence of its history and echoes, and creating a personal reflection on the xenophobia that can change fates.The book includes more than 250 reproductions from movies and research, but also family archives and creations by Amos Gitai and 7 conversations between Gitai and : Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Guy Amsellem, Arthur Miller, Hou Hanru, Annette Michelson, Richard Ingersoll, Elisabeth Lebovici & Stephan Levine), two poems (Mount Carmel and Lullaby to My Father) and a poetic essay on the Golem.(...) Her political and historical vision, her pleasure in life, her love for landscapes, Mount Carmel where she lives with her husband Munio, but also that of London's cold streets, or a lake in Finland its ... these experiences as a woman, the wisdom and her strong desire to learn and understand the world passes to us through these letters.Four voices taken, as if "in an echo chamber," between documentary imagery and extracts from classical literature – the same vivid memory that always accompanied the filmmaker and director in his understanding of Israeli state and society.The audience cannot remain passive, and takes on the difficult task of understanding the theatrical experience in the face of his thoughts, perceptions and opinions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.In spring 2023, Amos Gitai created a theatrical adaptation of his documentary trilogy House at the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris.On stage, the story of the House becomes a metaphor and the site of an artistic dialogue between actors and musicians from all over the Middle East, with different languages, origins and musical traditions, united in an attempt to tell together the memory of the past and the possibility of reconciliation.[15] The cast includes Irène Jacob, Micha Lescot, Menashe Noy, Bahira Ablassi, Kioomars Musayyebi and Alexey Kochetkov, with musical contributions from choirmaster Richard Wilberforce, soprano Dima Bawab and lighting by Jean Kalman.[18] Gitai selections were: Collège de France, Chair of Artistic Creation 2018–2019: Crossing borders, nine lectures followed by a colloquium: The creative process: contradictions, ethics, (re)interpretations.