Amos Gitaï
In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War breaks out, Amos Gitaï is an architecture student. The helicopter that carries him and his unit of emergency medics is shot down by a missile, an episode he will allude to years later in Kippur (2000). After the war, he starts directing short films for the Israeli public television, which has now gone out of business. In 1980, his first documentary, Bayit (The House), a portrait of Israelis and Palestinians living or having lived in the same Jerusalem house, is censored. Two years later, the controversy created by Field Diary, shot before and during the invasion of Lebanon, drives the filmmaker to exile, a situation that will inspire his first fiction features, Esther Forever (1985), Berlin-Jerusalem (1989), and Golem, the Ghost of Exile (1991). Amos Gitaï returns to Israel in 1993, the year of the signature in Washington of the Oslo I Accord, promoted by Yitzhak Rabin. This marks the beginning of a period of intense activity during which he directs documentaries and fiction films—creating an erudite aesthetic dialogue between the two genres—as well as plays, and supervises exhibitions. For the past forty years, Amos Gitaï has been building a body of work that is at once universal, politically conscious, and optimistic, intrinsically marrying the intimate, the political, and the poetic to pursue a deep quest for hope, without losing his critical edge.
