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Amos Gitai |
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filmes na 28ª MOSTRA:
11’09’’01 – September 11, 2002
Bait be Yerushalayim, 1998
Alila, 2003
Pineapple, 1984
Bangkok Bahrain, 1984
House, 1980
Berlin Jerusalem, 1989
Brand New Day, 1987
Neofascist Trilogy – In the Valley of the Wupper, 1993
Eden, 2001
Esther, 1985
Golem, the Petrified Garden, 1993
Golem, the Spirit of Exile, 1992
Kadosh, 1999
Kedma, 2002
Kippur, 2000
Birth of a Golem, 1991
Promised Land, 2004
The Neo-Fascist Trilogy – The Queen Mary, 1993
Wadi 1981-1991, 1981
Wadi Ten Years After, 1991
Wadi Grand Canyon, 2001
Day After Day, 1998
Field Diary, 1982
The Arena of Murder, 1996
Things, 1995
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Amos Gitai Retrospective
The 28th Mostra honors the Israeli director Amos Gitai with a retrospective of his films. Gitai will be in São Paulo for the world release of Welcome to São Paulo, a Mostra production in which he directed the segment Modernity. Gitai will stage a photo exhibition (“Parcours”) of his works at the Alvares Penteado Foundation. The exhibit was first held at the Georges Pompidou Centre, in Paris, from October to November 2003 and consists of 50 stills of Gitai’s films with textures reworked by him. Also during the 28th Mostra, Gitai’s book-catalogue will be launched by Cosac & Naify in partnership with the Mostra. On the occasion, the publisher will be launching the book Amos Gitai, which brings an in-depth analysis of Gitai’s oeuvre written by Serge Toubiana and Baptiste Piégay. Gitai designed the poster for the 28th Mostra.
Born Amos Weinraub in Haifa in 1950, the filmmaker adopted the last name Gitai in his late teens when his father, the architect Munio Weinraub, changed the family’s name. At first, the young Israeli followed the father’s career and attended the Technion Institute in Haifa. It was there that he made his first shorts.
Gitai had to stop his college studies to take military service – mandatory in Israel – and in 1973, he experienced a most dramatic helicopter accident, in which he was shot down and nearly killed. This near death experience made him rethink his architecture career and led him straight into cinema. At that time, the young Gitai used to walk around with a Super-8 camera, his mother’s gift - ironically, he was not carrying it on the day of the helicopter accident - , and from then on he started taking film-making more seriously. At first, he experimented with documentaries, also shooting them in 16mm cameras. After the war, he completed his university studies, and went to the US where he took a doctor’s degree in Architecture from the University of Berkeley.
As a young professional filmmaker, Gitai made ten documentaries for the only Israeli TV station of the time. It was the first time he would come across censorship, and his films House (1980) and Field Diary (1982), which discuss the Palestinian dilemma, were banned in Israel. After this bitter experience, he moved to Paris, where he lived for ten years shooting documentaries like the groundbreaking Ananas (1984), about pineapple growing, and Brand New Day, about the Japanese tour of the rock band Eurythmics and its lead singer Annie Lennox. Gitai’s often sharp and attentive camera detected the rise of neofascism in Europe, and it became the thread of a powerful 1994 trilogy: In the Valley of the Wupper (shot in Germany), In the Name of the Duce (portraying the political campaign of Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini), and The Queen Mary (about a rock group of the Parisian suburbs). In 1996, the murder of the Israeli prime-minister, Itzhak Rabin, draws once again his attention to home issues, which appeared in the documentary The Arena of Murder (20th Mostra).
While living in the French capital, Gitai delved deep into fiction and made Esther (1986), which was loosely inspired in the Biblical character. The film’s art direction was by the famous cinematographer Henri Alekan, who shot Jean Cocteau’s The Beauty and the Beast in 1946 and with whom Gitai made five other films. Esther was screened at the Cannes Festival Critics’ Week and is the first chapter of the director’s “exile trilogy” followed by Berlin-Jerusalem (1989), which discusses the European Jewish immigration to Palestine under British rule (the same topic addressed in Kedma, 26th Mostra) and won the Venice Festival Critics’ Award. The third part of this trilogy is Golem, the Spirit of the Exile, which also relates to two other films on the Jewish legend of Golem, Birth of a Golem (1991) and The Petrified Garden (1992).
In his fiction films, Gitai combines his experience as a documentarist with a keen sense of camera angles, thus finding in his long traveling shots the ideal medium for the extraordinary humanistic depth of his stories. This led to Kadosh (23rd Mostra), a reflection on family oppression against women in the Jewish society. It was his first film to be nominated for a Palm D’Or at Cannes. Kippur (2000) is a statement intended to heal his experience in the Yom Kippur War and where not by chance the protagonist is called Weinraub, like his family’s former last name. Eden (2001), an adaptation of Homely Girl - an Arthur Miller’s novel - has the writer himself playing a role in the film. Kedma (Critics Award at the 26th Mostra), relives the shock of Jewish European immigrants arriving in Palestine under British rule. In the bitter sweet comedy Alila (27th Mostra), the conflicts among residents of a condominium building serve as a metaphor for Israel’s present-day dilemmas.
Although he has clung to fiction, Gitai never gave up documentaries. He continues to work on a series of outstanding films about the transformations of a valley west of Haifa shown in shorts such as Wadi Rushima (1978) and Wadi (1981), and the more recent Wadi Grand Canyon (25th Mostra), in which he visits the region 20 years after the first film was made. Israel was Gitai’s contribution to 11’09’’01 – 11 September (26th Mostra), a series of 11 short films shot by international filmmakers portraying their views on the New York tragedy in 2001.
Filmography
1974 Ahare
1976 Charisma
1977 Shikun
1977 Political Myths
1978 Wadi Rushima
1978 Architectura
1979 M’Ora’ot Wadi Salib
1979 Cultural Celebrities
1979 Bikur Carter B’Israel
1980 In Search of Identity
1980 Bayit (House)
1981 Wadi
1981 American Mythologies
1982 Yoman Sadeh (Field Diary)
1984 Reagan: Image for Sale
1984 Bagkok Bahrain
1984 Ananas
1986 Esther
1987 Brand New Day
1989 Berlin Jerusalem
1991 Wadi 1981-1991
1991 Birth of a Golem
1992 The Spirit of the Exile
1992 Gibellina, Metamorphosis of a Melody
1993 The Petrified Garden
1994 In the Valley of the Wupper
1994 In the Name of the Duce
1994 Queen Mary
1994 Te’atron Hahaim
1995 Zihrom Devarim
1996 Arena of Murder (Zirat Ha’Rezach)
1996 Milim
1997 War and Peace in Vesoul
1998 Yom Yom
1998 Zion Auto-Emancipation
1998 Orange
1998 A House in Jerusalem
1999 Kadosh
2000 Kippur
2001 Eden
2002 Kedma
2002 9/11
2003 Alila
2004 Promised Land
filmes em outras edições:
ALILA, 2003
KEDMA, 2002
WADI GRAND CANYON, 2001
KADOSH - ABENÇOADOS, 1999
THE ARENA OF MURDER, 1996
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