31 Facts About Amos Gitai

Amos Gitai is an artist and an Israeli filmmaker, born 11 October 1950 in Haifa, Israel.

Amos Gitai has worked with Juliette Binoche, Jeanne Moreau, Natalie Portman, Yael Abecassis, Samuel Fuller, Hanna Schygulla, Annie Lennox, Barbara Hendricks, Lea Seydoux, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Henri Alekan, Renato Berta, Nurith Aviv, Eric Gautier and more.

In 2018, Amos Gitai was elected professor at the chair of artistic creation at the College de France, with a series of 12 lessons on cinema.

Amos Gitai's film Shikun, starring Irene Jacob and Bahira Ablassi, was an official selection at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Amos 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.

Amos Gitai graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1968.

Amos Gitai 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, Amos Gitai had to interrupt his architecture studies as he was called up to the reserve service as part of a helicopter rescue crew.

Amos Gitai was wounded when the helicopter he was in was hit by a Syrian missile.

Amos Gitai wants this house to be both a symbol and something very concrete; he wants it to become a character in a film.

Amos Gitai turns the valley into a symbol of a possible coexistence.

Amos Gitai continues with the making of the trilogy on the procedures of world capitalism and the trilogy on the resurgence of the European extreme right.

Amos Gitai then devotes a diptych to his parents, with the first film Carmel, which is an intimate reflection on the correspondence of his mother Efratia.

Amos 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.

Twenty years after the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister by a religious right-wing student on 4 November 1995, in Tel Aviv, Amos Gitai looks back on this traumatic event.

Also in 2016, a 540-page book dedicated to Amos Gitai was published by the Enrico Navarra Gallery and the Sebastien Moreu publishing house.

The work of the filmmaker Amos Gitai has nearly 90 titles, made over approximately 40 years.

Amos Gitai's work is indeed varied, but this diversity is extremely coherent.

Amos Gitai is one of the most respected filmmakers on the international scene, and 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 doesn't use things outside of his experience, there is a minimalism in his writing that I find essential, profoundly accurate and moving.

Amos Gitai has exhibited and published in leading institutions in Israel and around the world such as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum, the Pompidou Center in Paris, MoMa in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and more.

In Traces, Amos Gitai creates an audio-visual stroll with great intimacy through images taken from fourteen of his films.

The journey Amos 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.

In July 2016, a 540-page book on Amos Gitai was published by Galerie Enrico Navarra and Sebastien Moreu.

Similar to The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, Amos Gitai worked with Jeanne Moreau who was reading his mother's letters.

Amos Gitai's correspondence reveals, from the first letters of 1928, in which she addressed her father and sisters, her independent spirit, her curiosity to the world and to political life, until the letters of the 1990s, shortly before her death.

In spring 2023, Amos Gitai created a theatrical adaptation of his documentary trilogy House at the Theatre de la Colline in Paris.

Amos Gitai often teaches and attends conferences around the world.

Amos Gitai's lectures focused on his documentary and fictional work.

In 2018, after being elected as chair in Artistic Creation at the College de France in Paris, Amos Gitai was invited to give a series of 12 lessons and lectures on his cinematic work through an ethical, political and artistic lens, called 'Crossing the Borders'.