The Amos Gitai Collection
ChaiFlicks is proud to present a month-long curated series of award-winning films from the preeminent Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai.
Amos Gitai (born October 1950, Haifa) is a French-Israeli filmmaker, internationally known for his documentaries and feature films on the Middle East, the Israeli–Arab conflict, and the Holocaust memory in Europe. Between 1999 and 2018 ten of his films were entered in the Cannes Film Festival for the Palme d'Or as well as the Mostra, the Venice International Film Festival for the Golden Lion award. He has worked with Arthur Miller, Juliette Binoche, Jeanne Moreau, Natalie Portman, Yael Abecassis, Samuel Fuller, Hanna Schygulla, Annie Lennox, Barbara Hendricks, Léa Seydoux, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Liron Levo, Hanna Laslo, Ronit Elkabetz, Juliano Mer-Khamis, Mathieu Amalric, Henri Alekan, Renato Berta, Nurith Aviv, Éric Gautier, Caroline Champetier, Isabelle Ingold and more.
Amos Gitai was born to Munio Weinraub (Gitai), an architect formed at the pre-war German Bauhaus art school, and to Efratia Munschik Margalit Weinraub (Gitai), an intellectual, storyteller and a teacher. 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 reserve service as part of a helicopter rescue crew. While serving, he shot 8mm footage of the fighting, claiming this served as his entry into the world of film making. (Stanford University)
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West of the Jordan River
Award-winning filmmaker Amos Gitai returns to the West Bank to better understand the efforts of the citizens, both Israelis and Palestinians, to try to overcome the consequences of the 50-year occupation. Gitai's documentary intersperses footage of his interviews with Yitzhak Rabin from the 1990s...
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A Tramway in Jerusalem
The Light Rail Red Line of Jerusalem’s tramway connects the city from east to west, from the Palestinian neighborhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanina to Mount Herzl—a journey that comprises the culturally complex makeup of the city. This humorous and touching film, whose cast includes Mathieu Amalric...
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Kedma
Set seven days before the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948, a small rusted ship carrying a group of concentration camp survivors is met in Palestine by aggressive British troops. Tired and hungry, the hopeful immigrants must immediately take up arms against the Arabs. They thought they...
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Rabin, the Last Day
For many Israelis, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 marked a grim turning point for their country. In the words of the commission set up to investigate the murder, “Israeli society [would] never be the same again. As a democracy, political assassination was not part of ou...
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Rabin, The Last Day | Q&A with Writer/Director Amos Gitai
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Kadosh
Amos Gitai's KADOSH takes viewers inside the Mea Sherim quarter of Jerusalem, an enclave of the ultra-Orthodox almost never seen on the screen. Here, for ten years, the pious Rivka (Yael Abecassis, "Live and Become") has devoted herself to her husband Meir (Yoram Hattab), but their marriage remai...
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Alila
Warning - Contains Sexual Content | In Alila, director Amos Gitai (Kedma, Kadosh), "Israel's one-man new wave," (The Village Voice) has created an "engaging, subtly arresting drama" (Time Out New York) that examines the lives of a half dozen residents of a run-down Tel-Aviv apartment building. Th...
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Free Zone
Rebecca (Natalie Portman), an American who has been living in Jerusalem for a few months now, has just broken off her engagement. She gets into a cab driven by Hanna (Hanna Laslo), an Israeli. But Hanna is on her way to Jordan, to the Free Zone, to pick up a large sum of money that "the American"...
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One Day You'll Understand
Featuring a stunning performance from legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau ("Jules et Jim"), acclaimed Israeli director Amos Gitaï ("Promised Land") presents a meditation on memory, identity, and the reconciliation that follows a French businessman’s growing obsession with the secrets of his fa...
