Amos Gitai is the leading Israeli filmmaker of his generation. Born in Haifa in 1950, Gitai began making short experimental works with a super-8mm camera while studying architecture. Gitai brought his camera along while serving as a soldier during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and from his experiences filming on and off the battlefield arose a commitment to making films and videos about the deep complexities of contemporary Israel, anti-Semitism, and the fluid nature of borders. Celebrated in Europe and North America for such reality-inspired fiction films as Kadosh (1998), Kippur (1999), and Free Zone (2004), Gitai has also expanded the frontiers of nonfiction filmmaking with a series of documentaries that are as mutable as the shifting realities the artist records. Amos Gitai: Non-Fiction celebrates the filmmaker’s documentary work with the New York premiere of Gitai’s News from Home/News from House, along with the two earlier films in the trilogy, House and A House in Jerusalem, and six other feature-length documentaries.
Organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film.