Film program hosts Amos Gitai’s cinema

ISTANBUL

Amos Gitai’s ‘Alila’ will be screened today and on Nov 27 within the scope of the event titled ‘Homeland and Exile: Cinema of Amos Gitai.’

The new program at Pera Film Museum starts on Nov. 20. Pera Film, in collaboration with the Institut Français and the Consulate General of Israel, presents the program Homeland and Exile: Cinema of Amos Gitai. The program, which showcases seven films by Gitai, also presents the unique opportunity of a master class with the famous director. The program continues until Dec. 1.

The Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai bases his work largely on personal experience, including the Yom Kippur War and other historic events in Israel.

Controversial documentaries

Gitai brought his camera while serving as a soldier during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and from his experiences of filming on and off the battlefield arose a commitment to make films and videos about the deep complexities of contemporary Israel, anti-Semitism and the fluid nature of borders. Early in his film career, Gitai made controversial documentaries for Israeli television, including 1980’s “House,” about the politically driven changes a single residence in Jerusalem undergoes over the years, and 1982’s “Field Diary,” about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. 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.

Today, Gitai’s art has attained a profound maturity as he continues to explore themes that have accompanied his rich career as a director in other disciplines such as photography. His images oscillate between personal and collective memory. The coherence and evolution of his work are now evident through the diversity of the media he uses, constituting a complex mosaic whose guiding thread is essentially biographical. Major retrospectives of his work have been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Lincoln Center in New York and the British Film Institute in London.