Amos Gitai


Amos Gitai is an Israeli artist and filmmaker, born 11 October 1950 in Haifa, Israel.
Gitai's work was presented in several major retrospectives in Pompidou Center in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center in New York, and the British Film Institute in London. To date, Amos Gitai has created over 90 works of art, including a wide variety of formats such as feature and short films, fiction and documentaries, experimental work, television productions, installations and theater works.
Between 1999 and 2017 eleven of his films participated in the Cannes Film Festival for the Palme d'Or as well as The Venice International Film Festival for the Golden Lion award.
He has worked with Juliette Binoche, Jeanne Moreau, Natalie Portman, Hana Laszlo, Yael Abecassis, Samuel Fuller, Hanna Schygulla, Annie Lennox, Rosamund Pike, Barbara Hendricks, Léa Seydoux, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Irene Jacob, Henri Alekan, Mathieu Amalric, Pippo Delbono Renato Berta, Nurith Aviv, Éric Gautier and more. Since 2000 he has been collaborating with the French screenwriter Marie-José Sanselme.
He has received several prestigious awards, including the Roberto Rossellini Prize, the Leopard of Honor at the Locarno International Film Festival, the Robert Bresson Prize, the Paradjanov Prize, and the Lucchino Visconti Prize. He is a Commander des Arts and Letters and a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. In 2018, Amos Gitai was elected professor of artistic creation at the Collège de France, with a series of nine lectures on cinema, followed by a symposium.
The work of Amos Gitai has nearly 90 titles, made over approximately 40 years. To these must be added video installations, theatre productions and books. His work is indeed varied, but this diversity is extremely coherent. Over the years, travels, struggles, exile, encounters, Amos Gitaï articulates and re-articulates works which, in their shimmering, never cease to respond to and echo each other. He is now one of the most respected filmmakers on the international scene, and continues to explore new narrative and stylistic avenues, always in relation to contemporary reality, even when the narrative takes a detour into the historical or mythological past.
Amos Gitai has often spoken about the civic role of artists in society: "Sometimes art acts with a delay, preserving memory, the memory that those in power would like to erase because they call for obedience and do not want to be disturbed, they do not want dissent. But if artists remain true to their inner voice, they produce work that travels through time."
WWW Official Site

Early life

Gitai was born to Munio Weinraub, an architect formed at the pre-war German Bauhaus art school, and to Efratia Margalit, an intellectual, a storyteller and a teacher. He graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1968. 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 the reserve service as part of a helicopter rescue crew. Gitai was wounded when the helicopter he was in was hit by a Syrian missile. During his missions, he used a Super 8 camera to document the war. After the war, he embarked on a career as a filmmaker and made his first documentary in 1980, House.

Film career

Gitai began his career directing mostly documentaries. In 1980 he directed his first full-length film House, which follows a house in West Jerusalem, abandoned during the 1948 war by its Palestinian owner. In the film, Gitai follows the different house tenants over the years, making the house the focus of the Israeli socio-political conflict. It opens a democratic cinematic space around the same house where a split of perspectives on the situation and its history takes place.
The film was rejected and censored by Israeli television, an event which marked the filmmaker's conflictual relationship with the authorities of his country. It is to make this film exist despite the censorship and to continue along the path he had just begun, that he says at that time: "I decided to become a filmmaker". This relationship was soon to be fueled by the controversy surrounding his film Field Diary, made before and during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and resulting in a long exile in France.
House was the first part of a trilogy including the films A House in Jerusalem, and News from Home / News from House. It was the first of many trilogies; a concept Gitai consistently worked with during his career, offering a complex and layered view of the geopolitical Israeli reality.
To his biographical elements must be added the experience of the Yom Kippur War, in which he almost died at the age of 23, an experience that would influence all his future work. The traumatic event itself was the focus of a series of experimental short films and documentaries, before directing the film Yom Kippur in 2000, which definitively consecrated its stature after its positive reception at the Cannes Film Festival. The evocation of this intimate and common experience served by an impressive plastic sense is exemplary of Amos Gitai's art. The film also marks the beginning of the director's collaboration with screenwriter Marie-José Sanselme which dates until today.
He continues with the making of the three Wadi which similar to House is dealing with a specific location and examines the complex relationships between the residents of the former stone quarry – Eastern European immigrants, survivors of the camps and Arabs who have also been expelled from their homes due to the wars in Israel. Gitai turns the valley into a symbol of a possible coexistence.
His third trilogy deals with Israeli political-military practices. Yann Lardeau wrote about Field Diary:
He continues with the making of the trilogy on the procedures of world capitalism and the trilogy on the resurgence of the European extreme right. But also trilogies of fiction, trilogies of exile, trilogies of cities, trilogy of historical events decisive for Israel.
He then devotes a diptych to his parents, with the first film Carmel, which is an intimate reflection on the correspondence of his mother Efratia. The second film Lullaby to My Father traces the journey of his father Munio Gitai Weinraub from his childhood in Silesia, his Bauhaus studies with Mies van der Rohe and Hannes Meyer at the time of the rise to power and the conquest of power by the Nazis.

Gitai conducts tireless research on aesthetic means, which is anchored in the experimental uses of the camera from adolescence, and goes through the assertive stylisation of early fiction under the claimed influence of Bertolt Brecht and expressionism, as well as through the search for filming devices adapted to particular projects. One of the stylistic figures most willingly employed by Amos Gitai is the sequence shot, the long duration of the recording being used for multiple purposes never limited to visual seduction, but always in search of meaningful effects. A committed artist, Gitai is also the inventor of unexpected dramatic structures, such as the asymmetrical doubling of Berlin-Jerusalem, the spatial blocks of Alila or the temporal blocks of One day you'll understand, the destabilizing fluidity of the Promised Land, the critical superimpositions of The Arena of Murder and Free Zone, to the abruptly broken-in-two narrative of Disengagement or the single 81-minute sequence shot of Ana Arabia, which depicts a moment in the life of a small community of Jewish and Arab outsiders on the outskirts of Jaffa.
35 years after Field Diary, Gitai returns to the West Bank with West of the Jordan River, which describes the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians today. A tribute to those, "civilian or military, known or anonymous, who, in Israel, have not renounced reconciliation with the Palestinians", the film is presented in the Directors' Fortnight13 at the Cannes Film Festival.
2018 is a year of intense activity for the director, invited by the Venice Mostra to present two films in the competition of the Venice Film Festival. A Tramway in Jerusalem is a themed comedy that humorously observes moments of daily life on the Jerusalem tramway. The film stars 36 Israeli actors Yaël Abecassis, Hanna Laszlo, singer Noa Achinoam Nini, Palestinians and Europeans Mathieu Amalric and Pippo Delbono. On this tramway line that connects several neighborhoods in Jerusalem, from east to west, recording their variety and differences, this comedy humorously looks at moments in the daily lives of a few passengers, brief encounters that reveal a whole mosaic of human beings. It is these fragments of stories and memories that make up the contemporary reality of Israel.
The film is preceded by Amos Gitai's A Letter to a Friend in Gaza, which responds to the current crisis between Israel and Gaza. Tao Palestinians and two Israelis read texts inspired by Mahmoud Darwish, Yizhar Smilansky, Emile Habibi and Amira Hass, as an homage to a famous letter written by Albert Camus in 1943, which gives its title to the film.

Gitai works on Rabin

In 2015, his film The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin was presented in competition at the Venice Mostra and then at the Toronto International Film Festival. Twenty years after the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister by a religious right-wing student on 4 November 1995, in Tel Aviv, Gitai looks
back on this traumatic event. Placing the assassination in its political and social context, Yitzhak Rabin's Last Day mixes fictional reconstructions and archival footage in this political thriller that is also about the growing crisis in contemporary Israeli society.
Continuing his reflection on how art can reflect a historical event, Amos Gitai has also created in 2016 an exhibition/installation, Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination. It was presented first at the Maxxi Museum, Rome, under the title 'Chronicle of an Assassination Foretold', then at the BOZAR Museum in Brussels and at the Collection Lambert in Avignon. Ceramics, photographs, video installations and archival documents take up space to offer a new reading of the events leading up to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination.
This exhibition echoes a theatrical performance given in the Cour d'Honneur of the Palais des Papes on 10 July 2016 for the Avignon Festival. Based on the memories of Leah Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin's wife, Amos Gitai imagines an "able with four female protagonists, two actresses, Hiam Abbass and Sarah Adler, and two musicians, Edna Stern and Sonia Wieder-Atherton, four voices associated in a recitative mode, between lament and lullaby, which go back in time. The show was performed in the same year in English at the Lincoln Center in New York and at the Ford Theater in Los Angeles, then at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2018 with soprano Barbara Hendricks, at the Théâtre du Châtelet, in a production by the Théâtre de la Ville, in 2021, at the Coronet Theater in London, and more recently in German at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 2024. The show is never exactly the same from one performance to the next, since Gitai conceives each new presentation of the show as a re-creation, combining music, text, voices, and videos.
Finally, Gitai’s donation of his archives on his work on Rabin's assassination to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2018 led to an exhibition first presented at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, followed by a donation from the BnF to the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2021.

Novel adaptations

Gitai created several novel adaptations. Devarim is an adaptation of Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous. One day you'll understand is based on an autobiographical book by Jérôme Clément, president of the Arte television channel and one of the leading figures of French culture, and tells the story of a French writer tracing the story of his Jewish mother and her family during World War II. Roses à crédit is an adaptation of the novel by Elsa Triolet and takes a look at the materialist, post-war world of the French lower middle-class. The film was shot entirely in France.
In 2014 he directs the film Tsili, inspired by the novel by Aharon Appelfeld, and tells the story of the wandering of its heroine submerged in the nightmare of the Second World War. Tsili, a young Jewish woman, gathers all the forces of intuition and vitality to survive in this desperate universe.
starring Sarah Adler, Meshi Olinski, and Lea Koenig.
adapted from a novel by Aharon Appelfeld, he returns to the Second World War and the Holocaust:

Recent films

More recently, Gitai directed the "Confinement Trilogy", with Un tramway à Jérusalem, Laila in Haifa and Shikun. Inspired by Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, Shikun tells the story of the emergence of intolerance and totalitarian thinking through a series of episodes set in Israel in a single building, the Shikun. In this hybrid group of people of different origins and languages, some turn into rhinoceroses, but others resist. An ironic metaphor for life in our contemporary societies, starring Irène Jacob and Bahira Ablassi. The film was presented in the official selection at the Berlin Film Festival| Berlinale | in 2024.
In the same year, Amos Gitai presented his film Why War at the Venice Film Festival, Micha Lescot, Irène Jacob, and Jérôme Kircher. The film denounces war without showing it because "on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, the pain of others is denied," the filmmaker said in an interview with Le Monde.

Exhibitions and publications

Cinema installations, exhibitions and book publications are integral to Gitai's work. He has exhibited and published in leading institutions in Israel and around the world such as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum, the Pompidou Center in Paris, MoMa in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and more. Many of his exhibitions were dedicated to his parents Munio and Efratia, such as the 1996 retrospective initiated at the Pompidou Center, which deals with the work of his father or the publication of his mother's letters – Efratia Gitai's letters in 1994.
In 2011, he presents the exhibition Traces at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany and the Art Museum at Kibbutz Ein Harod in Israel. In Traces, Gitai creates an audio-visual stroll with great intimacy through images taken from fourteen of his films. Images and sounds, side by side, of destroyed walls in World War II, in them stolen property of the Jews living there, or of a crowd chanting "Mussolini" during Mussolini's granddaughter's election campaign in a video taken in Auschwitz. From the violent reality of the Middle East to the soft waltz of a veteran couple on the evening of their arrest. The journey Gitai offered is challenging and shaky, evoking the violence of its history and echoes, and creating a personal reflection on the xenophobia that can change fates. In doing so, Gitai builds the sensitive conditions for sharing the memory of places and of events.
In the same year, Gitai inaugurated the Museum of Architecture Munio Gitai Weinraub in his father's old offices in Haifa.
After directing his film Rabin, The Last Day in 2015, Gitai continues investigating Rabin's murder in presenting the exhibition Yitzhak Rabin : Chronicle of an Assassination, presented at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Italy, at the BOZAR Museum in Brussels, Belgium and at the Fondation Lambert in Avignon, France. Through working with ceramics, photographs and video installations, Gitai enables a new reading of the events leading up to the murder.
He also presents the exhibition Before and After, featuring two experimental films he filmed on his Super 8 camera during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The film Before and After and Black and White are exhibited along with still photographs. In Before and after, Gitai returns to his traumatic injury during a helicopter crash from which he managed to escape. The Super 8 camera shows the military jacket he wore at the time of the accident. It becomes the film's central figure. Along with the series of photographs presented, Gitai continues his post-mortem decoding work of the moment the experience becomes a personal memory. It is a process in which the subject disappears; What appears in its place is extreme compression of thick, grainy material, which translates to the stigma of the time and makes a picturesque feeling appear. What artistic situations can give a proper description of that event, to that trauma? What traces remain in memory – a few weeks after, or forty years after? The artist's journey is mutually and simultaneously fed by both film and still photography.
In July 2016, a 540-page book on Amos Gitai was published by Galerie Enrico Navarra and Sébastien Moreu. The book includes more than 250 reproductions from movies and research, but also family archives and creations by Amos Gitai and 7 conversations between Gitai and : Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Guy Amsellem, Arthur Miller, Hou Hanru, Annette Michelson, Richard Ingersoll, Elisabeth Lebovici & Stephan Levine), two poems and a poetic essay on the Golem.
In 2008–2009, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich dedicated a major exhibition to Amos Gitai and his father Munio Weinraub Gitai entitled Architektur und Cinema in Israel, which was presented the following year at the Tel Aviv Museum of Modern Art.
In 2014, the Reina Sofia Museum dedicated a major exhibition to him, Amos Gitai biografías. In the same year, the Cinémathèque française presented his film archives in an exhibition entitled Amos Gitai, architecte de la mémoire.
In 2022, at the invitation of the City of Florence, Amos Gitai will take over the Sala d'Arme of the Palazzo Vecchio with an installation entitled Promised Lands. Using fragments from his theatrical and cinematographic work, he will evoke migrants and their destinies, history and the present, in various languages spoken around the Mediterranean.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Amos Gitai presents a multimedia exhibition entitled Kippur, War Requiem at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and then at the Taddaeus Ropac Gallery.

Theatrical performances

In Gitai's body of work can also be found stage works. Like his cinematic interest, also in his theatrical pieces, Gitai focuses on the tension between the personal and the historical, between the local and the universal. Many of his works have been presented at leading institutions around the world, such as the Avignon Festival in France, the Paris Philharmonic and the Lincoln Center in New York. Among his works, Metamorphosis of a Melody that opened the Venice Biennale in 1993 and The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness ''with Jeanne Moreau that was presented in Festival d'Avignon in 2009 and in Odeon Theater in Paris in 2010.
At the same year he created the piece Efratia Gitai: Letters, which premiered at the Odeon Theater in Paris in 2010. Similar to The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, Gitai worked with Jeanne Moreau who was reading his mother's letters.
Another piece is Yitzhak Rabin : Chronicle of an Assassination, created following the movie Rabin, The Last Day and premiered at the 2016 Avignon Festival. In this work, Gitai draws on the memories of Leah Rabin, the prime minister's wife, and produces like a parable liberated from all formalism. Four female heroines, four voices reciting the text that becomes a text between lament and lullaby, recreate the unprecedented course of history and violence in which the nationalist forces opposed the peace project led by Yitzhak Rabin, by defection and incitement. Four voices taken, as if "in an echo chamber," between documentary imagery and extracts from classical literature – the same vivid memory that always accompanied the filmmaker and director in his understanding of Israeli state and society.
In 2019, the stage version of A Letter to a Friend in Gaza premiered at the Spoleto Festival in the United States. The piece is of a captivating, demanding, challenging and lyrical multimedia. At a time when art and entertainment are often synonymous, the play restores confidence in the theater's ability to ask difficult political and cultural questions. The audience cannot remain passive, and takes on the difficult task of understanding the theatrical experience in the face of his thoughts, perceptions and opinions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of proposing theory or solution, the play serves as a powerful trigger for much-needed political imagination. A Letter to a Friend in Gaza was originally a 34-minute film screened in 2018 at the Venice Festival. It was Nigel Redon, the director of the Spoleto Festival, who suggested Gitai to work on a stage version for the festival. His film and stage work share texts and actors, yet, paradoxically, the structure and feel of the film seem more theatrical, while the open horizon and stratified composition of the half-hour theatrical version give the impression of cinema.
In spring 2023, Amos Gitai created a theatrical adaptation of his documentary trilogy House at the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris. On stage, the story of the House becomes a metaphor and the site of an artistic dialogue between actors and musicians from all over the Middle East, with different languages, origins and musical traditions, united in an attempt to tell together the memory of the past and the possibility of reconciliation. "A mosaic of individual narratives, all dealing with the idea of home, lost or found". The cast includes Irène Jacob, Micha Lescot, Menashe Noy, Bahira Ablassi, Kioomars Musayyebi and Alexey Kochetkov, with musical contributions from choirmaster Richard Wilberforce, soprano Dima Bawab and lighting by Jean Kalman.
Invited by major European venues, the show was performed at the Berlin Festspiele then at the Barbican in London, at the Teatro Argentina as part of the Roma Europa Festival in Rome, and in 2025 at the Teatro Canal in Madrid.
After creating House in 2023, Amos Gitaï returns to the Théâtre national de La Colline in Paris in 2025 with a new show entitled Golem. This legendary figure from Kabbalistic texts—the Golem is a clay creature created to protect the Jewish community in response to persecution—was already the subject of a film trilogy in the early 1990s, with Birth of a Golem, Golem: The Spirit of Exile, The Petrified Garden. With this new multimedia theater production in nine languages, Gitai draws inspiration from a children's story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, texts by Joseph Roth and Lamed Shapiro, and one of his own texts, "Take Some Dust", and the biographies of his actors, to superimpose this myth on contemporary questions about the relationship between creation and destruction, and create a parable about the fate of persecuted minorities. The show was performed in the ancient theater of Pompeii in June 2025.
Archives
Amos Gitai's films are preserved in several film libraries around the world, including the Cinémathèque française, the Cinémathèque Suisse, and the Jerusalem Cinematheque. In addition, the filmmaker deposited the paper archives of several films at the Cinémathèque française in 2014.
In 2017, Stanford University acquired the digital archives of eight films by Amos Gitai, comprising 19 hard drives with 10.5 terabytes of data.
In 2018, Amos Gitai donated to the Bibliothèque nationale de France all the documentary material collected or produced since 1994 on Yitzhak Rabin: research, rushes, photographs, scripts, editing stages, comprising 30,000 documents and 150,000 files relating to seven films, documentaries and fiction: Let's Give Peace a Chance, The Arena of Murder, The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin. These documents, which are mainly digital, are the subject of a pioneering research and development program on new film archives, in collaboration with Stanford University. Echoing the exhibition designed by Amos Gitai and presented at the BnF on this occasion, Gallimard is publishing a book, Amos Gitai/Yitzhak Rabin, which offers reflections and analyses on the Rabin archives deposited at the BnF, as well as two long poems composed by Gitai.
"The decision to donate the collection to the Library was also dictated by the desire to preserve this highly symbolic collection in a country, France, where he experienced a warm welcome and support for creativity during his years of exile from Israel."

Teachings and conferences

Amos Gitai often teaches and attends conferences around the world. In 2017, he was a guest professor at University of California, Berkeley, where he studied in his youth. His lectures focused on his documentary and fictional work. Through the screening of several films, the audience was able to dive into Israel's political and social issues. As a skilled architect, Gitai has a unique way of understanding and representing a human experience through time and space, and through the films House, City and Border, Gitai managed to present a complex narrative and image of Israel in the context of a larger global discourse.
In 2018, after being elected as chair in Artistic Creation at the Collége de France in Paris, Gitai was invited to give a series of 9 lessons and lectures on his cinematic work through an ethical, political and artistic lens, called 'Crossing the Borders'. His lessons were: The documentary as metaphor; "I don't politicise my films, they have politicised me"; Depicting War; Space and Structure, Cinema and Architecture; Cinema and History; Is Cinema More Authoritarian Than Literature?; Collective Mythologies and Memories; Chronicle of an Assassination.
Amos Gitai was also a visiting professor in 2018 at Columbia University; in 2021 at the University of Tel Aviv; and in 2021-2022 at the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, for a series of lectures entitled: Transition, Crossing, Border.
Architecture
In 2014, the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine organized eight meetings between Amos Gitai and various guests, based on his documentary series Architecture in Israel/Conversations with Amos Gitai, consisting of 16 films of 23 minutes each. In this series, Gitai meets architects, sociologists, archaeologists, researchers, writers, and theologians, and converses with them about architectural and urban planning themes, drawing on the history and current events of Palestine and Israel—the Ottoman period, the British Mandate, Bedouin settlements, eclectic, brutalist, and modern architecture, and more. In each episode, archival materials—photos, plans, architectural drawings, etc.—illustrate these conversations. During meetings organized by the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, guests compare their views on a discipline that remains, in many ways, an essential focus for the director.
In the 2010s, Amos Gitai created the Munio Weinraub Gitai Architecture Museum in Haifa, in collaboration with the Haifa Municipality and the Haifa Museum Society, in his father's former architect's studio. Each year, the museum hosts temporary exhibitions on Israeli and international architecture and organizes meetings with architects and artists interested in architecture and urban planning. The exhibitions, which are thematic or monographic, aim to provoke discussion and exchange about architecture and its place in society.
Awards
  • 1989: Filmcritica "Bastone Bianco" Award - Special Mention at the Venice Film Festival 1989 for Berlin-Jerusalem
  • 1998: Wolgin Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival for Yom Yom
  • 1998: Best Israeli Screenplay at the Jerusalem International Film Festival for Yom Yom
  • 1999: UNESCO Prize at the Venice Film Festival 1999 for Zion, Auto-Émancipation
  • 2000: BAFTA for Best Foreign Film for Kadosh
  • 2000: François-Chalais Prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2000 for Kippur
  • 2002: UNESCO Prize at the Venice Film Festival 2002 for 11'09"01 - September 11
  • 2004: CinemaAvvenire Award at the Venice Film Festival 2004 for Terre promise
  • 2005: Roberto Rossellini Award at the Cannes Film Festival 2005
  • 2008: Honorary Leopard at the 61st Locarno International Film Festival for his entire body of work
  • 2013: Robert Bresson Prize at the Venice Film Festival 2013
  • 2013: Green Drop Award at the Venice Film Festival 2013 for Ana Arabia
  • 2013: SIGNIS Award - Honorable Mention at the Venice Film Festival 2013 for Ana Arabia
  • 2014: Paradjanov Prize
  • 2015: Mousse d'Or at the Venice Film Festival 2015 for The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin
  • 2015: Human Rights Film Network Award at the Venice Film Festival 2015 for The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin
  • 2018: UNIMED Award at the Venice Film Festival 2018 for A Tramway in Jerusalem
  • 2018: Human Rights Film Network Award at the Venice Film Festival 2018 for Letter to a Friend in Gaza
Nominations and selections
  • For Berlin-Jerusalem
  • * 1989: Golden Lion at the 46th Venice Film Festival
  • For Yom Yom
  • * 1998: Ophir Award for Best Director and Ophir Award for Best Screenplay
  • For Kadosh:
  • * 1999: Palme d'Or at the 52nd Cannes Film Festival
  • * 1999: Grand Prix at the 52nd Cannes Film Festival
  • * 1999: Jury Prize at the 52nd Cannes Film Festival
  • * 1999: Best Director Award at the 52nd Cannes Film Festival
  • * 1999: Ophir for Best Director and Ophir for Best Screenplay
  • For Kippur:
  • * 2000: Palme d'Or at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2000: Grand Prix at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2000: Jury Prize at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2000: Best Director Award at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2000: Special Mention for the entire cast at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2000: Ophir Award for Best Director
  • For Eden:
  • * 2001: Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Film Festival
  • For Kedma:
  • * 2002: Palme d'Or at the 55th Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2002: Grand Prix at the 55th Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2002: Jury Prize at the 55th Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2002: Best Director Award at the 55th Cannes Film Festival
  • For 11'09"01 - September 11:
  • * 2003: César Award for Best European Film at the 28th César Awards
  • For Alila:
  • * 2003: Golden Lion at the 60th Venice Film Festival
  • For The Promised Land:
  • * 2004: Golden Lion at the 61st Venice Film Festival
  • For Free Zone
  • * 2005: Palme d'Or at the 58th Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2005: Grand Prix at the 58th Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2005: Jury Prize at the 58th Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2005: Best Director Award at the 58th Cannes Film Festival
  • * 2005: National Education Award at the 58th Cannes Film Festival
  • For Ana Arabia:
  • * 2013: Golden Lion at the 70th Venice Film Festival
  • * 2013: Grand Jury Prize at the 70th Venice Film Festival
  • * 2013: FIPRESCI Prize at the 70th Venice Film Festival
  • * 2013: Special Jury Prize at the 70th Venice Film Festival
  • For The Last Day of Yitzhak Rabin:
  • * 2015: Golden Lion at the 72nd Venice Film Festival
  • * 2015: Best Screenplay Award at the 72nd Venice Film Festival
  • * 2015: Green Drop Award at the 72nd Venice Film Festival
  • For West of the Jordan:
  • * 2017: Golden Eye at the 70th Cannes Film Festival
  • For Laila in Haifa:
  • * 2020: Golden Lion at the 77th Venice Film Festival
  • * 2020: Queer Lion at the 77th Venice Film Festival
  • For Shikun:
  • * 2024: 74th Berlin International Film Festival
  • For Why War:
  • * 2024: 82nd Venice Film Festival
Honors

Favourite films

In 2022, Gitai participated in the Sight & Sound film polls of that year. It is held every ten years to select the greatest films of all time, by asking contemporary directors to select ten films of their choice.
Gitai selections were:Germania anno zero Touch of Evil Stalker Ivan the Terrible La Caduta degli Dei The Naked Kiss Le Mépris Berlin Alexanderplatz Some Came Running

Filmography

Fiction

Golem in Pompei

Documentaries

Letter to A Friend in Gaza West of the Jordan River Reflections on Architecture Architecture in Israel: Conversations with Amos Gitai The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness New from Home / News from House Wadi Grand Canyon 2001 Zion, Auto-Emancipation A House in Jerusalem Orange Kippur, War Memories War and Peace in Vesoul The Arena of murder Munio Weinraub Gitai Architect Milim Metamorphosis of a Melody Queen Mary '87 Give Peace a Chance

Short films

Words With Gods The Book of Amos The Dybbuk of Haifa 11 September – 11'09'01' Surgeon General's Warning Reagan: Image for Sale American Mythologies In Search of Identity Cultural Celebrities Jimmy Carter's visit in Israel Wadi Rushmia Architectura Under the Water Singing in Afula Public House Political Myths Hagvul Dimitri Charisma My Mother at the Seashore Lucy Blowing Glass The International Orthodontist Congress Pictures in the Exhibition Memphis U.S.A Memphis U.S.A. Water Ahare Images of War 1, 2, 3 Arlington U.S.A Shosh Talking About Ecology Fire Eats Paper, Paper Eats Fire Memories of a comrade of the 2nd Aliya Windows in David Pinsky no.5 Souk Women's dialogues Waves Geography according to Modern man and His Control on the Environnement Textures Black Is White Details of Architecture
  • ''Arts and Crafts and Technology''

Exhibitions/Installations

Kippur, War Requiem, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, 2023Promised Lands, Palazzo Vecchio, Sala d'Arme, Florence, Italy, 2022Champs de mémoire, Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, France, 2019The Law of the Pursuer, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Allemagne, 2017Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination, MAXXI, Rome, Italie, 2016; Bozar-Centre for Fine Arts, Bruxelles, Belgique, 2016; Collection Lambert, Avignon, France, 2016; Galerie 75 Faubourg, Paris, France, 2017Amos Gitai Before and After, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzbourg, Villa Kast, Autriche, 2015Amos Gitai Architecte de la mémoire, Cinémathèque Française, Paris, France, 2014; Musée de l'Élysée, Lausanne, Suisse, 2015; Cinéma Galeries, Bruxelles, Belgique, 2015Amos Gitai Strade | Ways Talking to Gabriele – Carpet – Lullaby to my Father, Palazzo Reale, Salle des Cariatides, Milan, Italie, 2014–15Amos Gitai Army Days Horizontal. Army Days Vertical, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Espace de Pantin, France, 2014Las biografías de Amos Gitai, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, 2014Before and After, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Espace de Pantin, France, 2014; Villa Kast, Salzbourg, Austria 2015Disaster – The End of Days, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Espace de Pantin, France, 2014Amos Gitai Architecture de la mémoire,, Rencontres photographiques de Arles, France, 2012Amos Gitai Architetture della memoria, Mole Antonelliana, Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italie, 2011– 2012Traces. Lullaby to My Father, Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel, 2011; Meisterhaus Vassily Kandinsky/Paul Klee – Dining room, Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 2011Traces. Efratia's Correspondence, Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel, 2011Traces – Munio Gitai Weinraub, Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel, 2011Amos Gitai Traces, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2011Lullaby for my father, a video presentation in Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, Israel, 2010Amos Gitai Citations, Biennale Evento, Base sous-marine, Bordeaux, France, 2009Munio Weinraub, Amos Gitai Architektur und Film in Israel, Pinakothek der Moderne-Architektur Museum, Munich, Germany, 2009; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, 2009Amos Gitai: Non-Fiction, MoMA, New York, 2008Amos Gitai News From House News From Home, Kunst-Werke, Berlin, Germany, 2006; Centre chorégraphique national, Montpellier, France, 2006In memory of Munio Gitai Weinraub, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2006Amos Gitai Parcours, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2003Public Housing, Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya, Israel; Saitama Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan, 2000; Jerusalem Museum, Israel, 1994Opening Chen Zhen, Helena Rubinstein Pavillon, Tel Aviv, Israel, 1998Recycling Exhibition, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, 1975

Performances

Golem, La Colline Théâtre National, 2025, Teatrum Mundi, Pompeii, 2025House, La Colline Théâtre National, adaptation of documentary trilogy House ; Berlin Festspiele, 2024; Teatro Del Canal, Madrid, 2025Yitzhak Rabin: Chronik eines Mordes, Burgtheater, Vienna, Austria, 2024; Theatre de la Ville, Paris, France, 2021; Coronet Theater of London, UK, 2021; Philharmonie de Paris, France, 2018; John Anson Ford Theater, Los Angeles, USA, 2017; Lincoln Center Festival, New York, USA, 2017; Festival d'Avignon, France, 2016

Teachings

Collège de France, Chair of Artistic Creation 2018–2019: Crossing borders, nine lectures followed by a colloquium: The creative process: contradictions, ethics, interpretations.
  • Inaugural lesson: The camera is a kind of fetish – Filming in the Middle East.
  • Documentary as metaphor. House and Wadi, two documentary trilogies filmed over a quarter-century; Pineapple
  • "I don't politicize my films, they politicize me".
  • Representing war
  • Space and structure, cinema and architecture
  • Cinema and history
  • Is cinema more authoritative than literature?
  • Mythologies and collective memories
  • Chronicle of an assassination

Books

  • * Amos Gitai, Kippur, War Requiem, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2023
  • * Jean-Michel Frodon, Amos Gitai et l’enjeu des archives, Editions du Collège de France, 2021, https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/editions/hors-collection/amos-gitai-et-enjeu-des-archives-9782722605794
  • * Amos Gitai / Yitzhak Rabin Chroniques d'un assassinat, Antoine de Baecque, Patrick Boucheron, Ouzi Elyada, Amos Gitai, Marie-José Sanselme, Éditions Gallimard / Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 2021
  • * Amos Gitai, Galerie Enrico Navarra, éditions Sébastien Moreu, Paris, 2016
  • * Serge Toubiana, Frédéric Maire et Matthieu Orléan, Amos Gitaï, architecte de la mémoire, Paris, Cinémathèque française / Éditions Gallimard, 2014, CPL Editions Centro Primo Levi, New York, 2018 – ; Yediot Aharonot, Tel-Aviv, 2011;,, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2010
  • * Genèses, Jean-Michel Frodon, Amos Gitai, Marie-José Sanselme, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2009
  • * Munio Weinraub / Amos Gitai – Architektur und Film in Israel, Architektur Museum – Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 2008
  • * Amos Gitai: Exile and Atonement, Ray Privett, Cinema Purgatorio, 2008.
  • * News from Home, Amos Gitai, Walther König, Köln, 2006
  • * Cinema di Amos Gitai: Frontiere e territori, Serge Toubiana, Bruno Mondadori, Torino, 2006
  • * Serge Toubiana & Baptiste Piégay, The Cinema of Amos Gitai, Lincoln Center / Cahiers du cinéma, 2005 ; Exils et territoires, le cinéma d’Amos Gitai, Cahiers du cinéma, 2003; Exilios y territories, el cine de Amos Gitai, Serge Toubiana, Baptiste Piégay, Semana Internacional de Cine, Valladolid, 2004
  • * Mont Carmel, Amos Gitai, Éditions Gallimard, 2003 ; Monte Carmelo, Amos Gitai, Bompiani, Milano, 2004
  • * Serge Toubiana, Amos Gitai,  Mostra internacional de cinema / Cosac Naify, São Paulo, 2004
  • * Parcours, Amos Gitai, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2003
  • * Kippour, Amos Gitai, Marie-José Sanselme, Arte Editions / 00h00.com, Paris, 2003
  • * Amos Gitai, Cinema, Politics, Aesthetics, Irma Klein, KM, Tel Aviv, 2003
  • * Amos Gitai, Cinema forza di pace, Edited by Daniela Turco, Le Mani, Genova, 2002
  • * Munio Gitai Weinraub, Bauhaus architect in Israel, Richard Ingersoll, Electa, Milano, 1994
  • * Paul Willemen, The Films of Amos Gitai, a Montage, BFI Publishing, 1993
  • * The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, Amos Gitai, Mazzotta, Milano, Genèses, Jean-Michel Frodon, Amos Gitai, Marie-José Sanselme, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2009.
  • * ''Amos Gitai, Edited by Alberto Farassino, Mostra Internazionale Riminicinema, Rimini, 1989''