Amos Gitai

The story of over a dozen distinct characters who inhabit an apartment complex located in a rundown neighborhood of Tel Aviv, Israel. (Kino International)

The year 2000 approaches in Jerusalem's Orthodox Mea Shearim quarter, where the women work, keep house, and have children so the men can study the Torah and the Talmud. Rivka is happily and passionately married to Meir, but they remain childless. The yeshiva's rabbi, who is Meir's father, wants Meir to divorce Rivka: "a barren woman is no woman." Rivka's sister, Malka, is in love with Yakov, a Jew shunned by the yeshiva as too secular.

Set seven days before the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948, a small rusted ship, with a group of concentration camp survivors from Shoah, is received at the new territory with open hostility. They are met by British troops, who are shooting at them, and are trying to forbid them from disembarking. As well, the survivors are met with guns blasts being shot by the Jewish secret army, who has come to help them.

The film takes place in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War in which Egypt and Syria launched attacks in Sinai and the Golan Heights. The story is told from the perspective of Israeli soldiers. We are led by Weinraub and his friend Ruso on a day that begins with quiet city streets, but ends with death, destruction and devastation of both body and mind.

The effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks are told from different points of view around the world. [IMDB]

A slice of life - day after day - in Haifa, where Moshe and Didi's marriage is on the rocks, affairs are casual, and Moshe's angst about health, his parents, sex, communication, and business are pervasive and existential. Moshe's mother is Jewish, his father an Arab; his father may or may not sell ancestral land; his wife and mistress have lovers, one is a close friend; much of Moshe's surroundings seem under construction or in renovation. A cousin watches a security monitor without comment.

Amos Gitai's beautiful new film is a quietly sweeping movie about intersected lives in transit. (New Yorker Films)

The city of São Paulo, as seen through the lenses of 13 directors. (imdb)

At a stone quarry above Hebron, Arab stonecutters work without explosives to cut away slabs shipped to cities to build houses. We visit a site in an old Arab quarter of Jerusalem where Palestinian laborers are enlarging a house for a Jewish family that had been an Arab family's home until 1948. We meet the house's present owner, a Jewish professional. We meet a stonemason at work on the addition; he talks about his hatred of Jews... (imdb)

This documentary by Amos Gitai is a personal look at the aftermath of the Rabin assassination. (imdb)

Danny Cornish, a sort of stateless man who arranges art exhibits, is called from Tel Aviv to Paris with the news that a great uncle has died, in Birobidjan, the autonomous Jewish zone in Russia, leaving him a valuable art collection and the hand of a huge sculpture of a Golem. (imdb)

In Tel Aviv, people prepare food, eat, make love, get pregnant, and die. Can one find peace in this life, asks one character at a wake; can there be an act of freedom in this modern life, asks another. Goldman's much-despised father has died; his friends Caesar and Israel set off for the funeral. They miss it, but go to Goldman's house later. Caesar has women troubles: his son from a previous marriage is ill; he's promised marriage to two women of opposite temperament. (imdb)

Can a house be a metaphor for Arab-Jewish relations in Israel? Amos Gitai returns to the house in West Jerusalem he profiled in 1980. He interviews members of the Jewish families who live there, and he talks with the Arab family who lived in the house until 1948. They are now in East Jerusalem and pay a nearly furtive visit to the street in front of their old house. Gitai also interviews Palestinian laborers at work on renovations and excavating an old tunnel to the Holy Mount. (imdb)

In 1982, Amos Gitai and a film crew travel around the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as tensions mount, leading to the Israeli army's invasion of Lebanon. Gitai contrasts Palestinian refugee camps with new Zionist settlements; he goads Israeli soldiers with his camera, he visits a strawberry field where Palestinian women work and the home of Bassam Shak'a, the mayor of Nablus on the West Bank, who is under house arrest. (imdb)

Part of controversial Israeli director Amos Gitai's TERRITORIES series, this set of documentaries examines the relationships and tensions between several Palestinians and Israelis over a 20-year period in Wadi Rushmia. (indiepixfilms.com)

"Promised Land" tells the story of a group of young unwitting Estonian girls smuggled through Egypt to be auctioned off as prostitutes in Israel, and of their initiation into this trade of flesh, and finally of the accidental freeing of one girl who most fight for her freedom. (imdb)

Documentary about the process canned pineapple takes from cultivation to sale.

A political drama centered around Israel's pullout from the occupied Gaza strip, in which a French woman of Israeli origin (Binoche) returns to the West Bank. (imdb)

A man endeavors to collect memories of his grandparents who died in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. (imdb)

A documentary about Gitai's father, Mounir, a famous architect.

Shot in a single plane-sequence of 81 minutes, the film shows the life of a small community of exiles, Jews and Arabs, who live in an enclave forgotten on the border between Jaffa and Bat Yam in Israel. One day, Yael, a young journalist, visits them. Among the stalls in ruins, full of lemon trees in the orchard, surrounded by several houses, she discovers a series of characters that do not correspond to the clichés of the region. (37.mostra.org)

A young couple marry in France in the 1940s and the film follows the arc of their marriage over the next decade. As France recovers from the trauma of the war, the wife finds herself increasingly caught up in acquiring material possessions while the husband prefers a more traditional lifestyle. (imdb)

During World War II, Tsili, a young Jewish woman, hides in the forests of Chernivtsi, Ukraine, after her entire family's deportation to the concentration camps. Marek, another Jewish refugee, finds her and addresses her in Yiddish. With limited social skills due to traumatic experiences, she has a difficult time communicating with him. The two manage to form a bond until the day Marek goes down to the village looking for food, never to return.

From Israel's most important filmaker, CARMEL is Amos Gitai's (KADOSH, KIPPUR) deeply personal and resonant meditation on Jewish and Israeli identity. Using both fiction and documentary techniques, Gitai links his family history to ancient history. (Anonymous)

On 4 November 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is shot down at a rally in Tel-Aviv. His killer turns out to be a 25-year-old Jewish observant. Investigation into this brutal murder reveals a dark and frightening world that made this tragic deed possible. A subculture of hate fuelled by hysterical rhetoric, paranoia and political intrigue. The extremist rabbis and militant Israeli settlers for whom peace meant betrayal. And the security agents who saw what was coming and failed to prevent it. (liffe.si)

With the feel of experimental film, Gitai mixes storytelling, readers' theater, cityscapes (usually seen from moving trains), and desolate landscapes to mediate on the act of creation. What if a golem were fashioned out of dirt, much like Adam, and came to life? The film imagines it, in the desert and in Moscow. Interspersed are stories of a 14th-century Tuscan artist's creation of a tower that plays music when the wind blows, of a film director, and of Jeremiah and Sirat. (imdb)

An allegory of the Golem, a Jewish mythical creature personifying displacement and exile, this film tells the story of a woman (similar to the biblical Ruth) and her sisters, who are forced into exile after the death of their husbands. It is set in 1990s Paris, where the director was living in self-imposed exile following the ban on his 1982 documentary in Israel. The recurring theme of the film is migrations and unrooting, like the legendary Golem. (imdb)

Ahasverus, king of Persia and Media, puts aside Vashti and makes Esther his queen, choosing her among maidens in a kingdom stretching from India to Ethiopia. Esther, using information from Mordecai, her uncle and patron, saves the king from assassination. Haman, the king's favorite, is miffed when Mordecai won't bow to him, so he orders death to all Jews in the kingdom, under the seal of the king. (imdb)

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. Interspersing footage of his interviews with Yitzhak Rabin from the 1990s with the contemporary interviews of everyday citizens.

Is the story of Samantha and Dov Ernst, American Zionists who emigrated to Palestine. Kalkofsky, a German Jew and bookseller, left behind his family in Europe. He accommodates Silvia, a young revolutionary against British rule.

The Eurythmics in concert exploring Japan.

Two interconnected stories in the 1930s, one set in Berlin, the other in Palestine: Mania Vilbouchevich Shohat, called Tania, a Russian Jew and revolutionary, goes from Minsk to Palestine to live on a collective. Her friend, Else Lasker-Schuler, expressionist poet and German Jew, is in Berlin, writing, caring for her son, watching Hitler's movement take power. She goes to Jerusalem and imagines a park for Arab and Jew. Her poems, voiced from within, capture her experience. (imdb)

Daily life is seen in Jerusalem as seen by a tram.