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For the past three decades, Israeli
filmmaker Amos Gitai has produced a series of probing,
hard-hitting fiction films and documentaries that
have explored the length and breadth of Israeli history
and society. Israel in ways seems to be a country
held together through a number of dynamic tensions:
Israeli vs. Palestinian, but also secular vs. religious
and Ashkenazim vs. Sephardim; Gitai’s films are often
set precisely at these social pressure points. Trained
as an architect, Gitai first reflex as a filmmaker
is to look at his characters through the spaces they
inhabit. The long, mesmerizing tracking shots that
have become one of his stylistic signatures precisely
demarcate the spaces of these conflicts, often showing
within a single shot the very different relations
his characters have to these spaces. Always controversial,
Gitai’s films ask questions, and never pretend
to provide answers. But the questions he poses are
precisely the ones that most need to be addressed;
the challenge is then to viewers to look into themselves
and really think about the answers they might give — and
what those answers might mean. Gitai’s films
can be contradictory, uneven, at times excessive,
but they’re never, ever
easily forgettable. Now more than ever, his films,
both in fiction and documentary, appear to be one
of the most vital bodies of work in cinema today.
We expect Amos Gitai to be with us for the New York
premiere of his most recent film, Free
Zone, as well as at several other screenings
during the course of the series.
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Affiliate ticket price of $6.00 for Jewish Museum, American-Israeli Cultural Foundation, Society for the Advancement of Judaism and American Sephardi Foundation members.
PLUS SAVE THE DATE!
The 15th Annual New York Jewish Film
Festival 2006 runs January 11 - 26
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Amos Gitai’s best-known film in
the U.S., Kadosh, is a provocative tale
of two couples in Mea Shearim, an ultra-orthodox
neighborhood in Jerusalem. Happily married for 10
years, Meir and Rivka have not produced any children;
Malka, Rivka’s sister, is in love with Yaakov, a
former member of her religious community who has
since abandoned it to join the army. The announcement
that their rabbi has decided that Malka should marry
his assistant sets off an emotional chain reaction
that brings personal emotions and passions directly
into confrontation with tradition and notions of
women’s proper place. Throughout his career, Gitai
has interspersed his fiction features with work in
documentary, and in Kadosh his documentary
sensibility shines through. There is an extraordinary
sequence that opens the film that follows Meir’s
morning prayers, which serves to slowly bring the
viewer into the very special world it portrays.
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Wed Nov 30: 2
Sat
Dec 3: 8:40 (Intro by Amos Gitai)
Wed Dec 7: 1:45
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Something of a valentine to Gitai’s
native city of Haifa, Yom Yom is the story
of a man his father calls Moussa and his mother calls
Moshe; that’s because his father is an Arab
and his mother Jewish. Moussa/Moshe seemingly lives
his life caught between such problematic dichotomies.
Should he leave his wife or stay with her? Should
he be angry at his best friend for sleeping with
his mistress? In Yom Yom Moshe/Moussa navigates
through such emotional and political minefields,
somehow always finding a way to balance all the competing
claims on him. “…Yom
Yom draws on Haifa’s tradition of peaceful
co-existence between Arab and Jewish neighbors to
tell a dark comic tale of characters driven by divided
loyalties and neurotic ambitions. Gitai’s genius
is to show the conflict infiltrating every encounter,
from the marketplace to the bedroom and beyond.” – Leslie
Camhi, Village Voice
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Wed Nov 30: 4:15
Sat Dec 3: 4
Tue Dec 6: 3
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Amos Gitai’s new film begins with
a powerful sequence of a young woman, Rebecca (Natalie
Portman), sitting in the back of a car weeping. Her
marriage in tatters, all she can do is ask her driver
to just keep going. Hanna (Hanna Laslo), the driver,
is in a hurry to keep an appointment in Jordan, where
she needs to meet a man who owes her husband some
money. Her appointment is in a small area in Jordan’s
northeast where Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia come
together, a kind of “free zone” where people
from whatever nation can go to sell cars and just
about anything else. But when Hanna and Rebecca finally
get there, they’re told by a Palestinian woman, Leila
(Hiam Abbass), that their contact has left. In Free
Zone, Gitai has captured an extraordinary pocket
of the infinitely complex reality of the Middle East,
a place on the verge of exploding that can nevertheless
still bear witness to all kinds of deals and transactions
being made between declared enemies. Israeli actor
Hanna Laslo received the Best Actress award at Cannes
for her stunning performance in the film.
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Wed Nov 30: 6:30 (Intro by Amos Gitai)
Fri
Dec 2: 7 (Intro by Amos Gitai)
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ěIn this haunting remembrance
of things past, filmmaker Gitai conjures up a shattering
vision of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which he himself
was wounded. Two friends head for the Golan Heights
to join up with their unit, but are deflected into
a medical team that helicopters in to rescue the
wounded. From the moment that the reservists begin
driving to the front lines, literally searching for
the location of war, Gitai edges us into ever more
lunar landscapes where time, flesh, the very earth,
are fatally susceptible to distortion and/or disintegration. Kippur is
less about a specific struggle between states than
it is an evocation of the hallucinatory state of
war: Confusion, shock, numbing fatigue, constant
cacophony. Gitai makes us experience bone-deep the
impact of the battlefield — personal and cosmic,
realistic and surreal — and earns Kippur pride
of place in a tradition defined by Sam Fuller’s Steel
Helmet and Stanley Kubrick’s Full
Metal Jacket. ě – 2000 New York Film Festival
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Wed
Nov 30: 8:45 (Intro by Amos Gitai)
Sun Dec 4: 1:15
Wed Dec 7: 4
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Gitai’s first fiction feature, Esther is
a reflection on the Book of Esther. The film dramatizes
the story of the Jewish woman who is taken as the
wife of King Ahasverus. She discovers that a plot
is being hatched to destroy the Jews, and uses her
power and position to save them. The Bible story
becomes a springboard for Gitai to meditate on a
whole series of national myths of destruction and
survival, and the ways in which these myths affect
contemporary realities and politics. “(Amos
Gitai) holds the story at an analytical distance.
Events are re-enacted in a sequence of ritual tableaux
shot in the ruins of Wadi Salib, the old Arab neighborhood
of Haifa that the Palestinians abandoned after the
1948 war. The sense of ancient, unsettled scores
that have simmered for centuries is almost palpable
in this beautiful but ravaged territory…The
juxtapositions suggest how overwhelmingly the region’s
history continues to haunt Israelís present.” – Stephen
Holden,
The New York Times
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Thu Dec 1: 1
Thu Dec 1: 4:45
Fri Dec 2: 3
Sat Dec 3: 2
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, shown on DVD
One of Gitai’s greatest works,
Field Diary came out of a moment when increasing
segments of Israeli society were beginning to realize
that maintaining the Occupied Territories was brutalizing
both Palestinian and Israeli societies. Field Diary
records Gitai’s encounters with Israeli soldiers,
officials and the Palestinian inhabitants of West
Bank towns. Responses vary widely to the very act
of being filmed; many ignore Gitai, some try to stop
him, others confess their thoughts and feelings about
the Occupation. Other times Gitai’s camera simply
travels down the roads connecting (or at times separating)
towns and communities, giving us an almost tactile
sense of the land, of the space itself, that lay
at the heart of the dispute. A landmark film, and
one whose cinematic innovation and political observations
remain every bit as impressive today.
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Thu Dec 1: 3
Fri Dec 2: 1
Fri
Dec 2: 9:15 (Intro by Amos Gitai)
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Berlin Jerusalem follows
the journeys of two women to Jerusalem in the period
between the world wars. One, Mania Shohat, was one
of the first Russian Zionists; the other, Elsa Lasker-Schüler,
was an important German poet. For both women the
move represented the possibility of a kind of personal
fulfillment increasingly difficult in Europe, yet
the contrasting experiences of each can be traced
back to their very different ideas about what that
fulfillment might in fact be. “In Berlin
Jerusalem,
the city of Jerusalem organizes the narrative: that
is where the film’s two heroines want to go,
where they meet each other, and where the narrative
ends. In this film, Jerusalem appears in all its
chimerical aspects. It is a mystical city, Elsa Lasker-Schüler’s
poetic city, but it is also the city of the first
Jewish migrants, an Arab city and a contemporary
megalopolis. Reality erupts into the film as something
sudden and lethal, like the gunshots, the explosions,
the chaos…” – Mikhail Iampolski, "The
Road to Jerusalem," in The
Films of Amos Gitai: A Montage, ed. Paul Willemen.
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Fri
Dec 2: 5
Sun Dec 4: 3:45
Tue Dec 6: 1
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A night in the Sinai desert. A group of men and women
keep warm around a campfire under the moonlight.
The women come from Eastern Europe, the men are Bedouins.
Tomorrow they will secretly cross the border. Tomorrow,
Diana and the others will be beaten, raped and auctioned
off. They will be passed from one hand to another,
merchandised by Anne into Hanna’s hostess club, victims
of an international network of trafficking women.
One night in the club, Diana meets Rose. She asks
for help. Their encounter is a sign of hope in the
women’s descent into hell.
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Sat Dec 3: 6:15
(intro by Amos Gitai)
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May 7, 1948: With the British
about to end their mandate and creation of the state
of Israel, violence rages between the Jewish and
Arab communities. A European cargo freighter packed
with concentration camp survivors heads towards Palestine;
as underground Jewish forces prepare for the ship’s
arrival, British soldiers position themselves to
stop what they see as an unauthorized landing. “Yiddish
is just one of a bouquet of languages spoken in Kedma,
Israeli auteur Amos Gitai’s visionary re-imagining
of his country’s birth in 1948. The film opens
with a mesmerizing traveling shot aboard a ship carrying
Jewish immigrants from Europe to Palestine. Upon
landing, they’re swept up into the confusion
of battle between British, Arab, and Jewish forces.
Gitai’s
Holy Land is a locus of displacements: The British
soldiers are pathetically absurd, and Jewish and
Arab refugees cross paths without understanding.
The problem is that, some 50 years later, neither
Gitai nor anyone else for that matter can see a clear
solution to this dilemma.”– Leslie Camhi, Village
Voice
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Sun
Dec 4: 5:40
Wed Dec 7: 6:30
Thu Dec 8: 2
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“Alila revolves around a small apartment
complex undergoing renovations and the people who
live and work there. The residents range from aging
Holocaust survivors disturbed by the presence of
illegal immigrants on the work site to the highly-sexed
Hezi, who rents a room to enjoy the pleasures of
his beautiful young mistress. Even Ezra, the contractor,
is unhappy: his ex-wife constantly taunts him, while
his son barely tolerates him. The film moves frequently
between characters and storylines, but the most dramatic
is the decision by Ezra’s son to desert shortly after
he is called up for his military service. Against
the background of the military police search for
the young man, underlying tensions bubble slowly
to the surface… (Gitai’s) canvas appears to
be increasingly critical; yet the moments of resistance
he locates within the narrative act as rays of hope
in a society that seems to be losing its moorings.”
– Piers Handling, 2003 Toronto International Film
Festival |
Wed Dec 7: 8:30
Thu Dec 8: 4
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