Amos Gitai

Amos Gitai was born in 1950 in Haifa

Amos Gitai was born in Haifa on October 11, 1950. His father, Munio Weinraub, was an architect trained at the Bauhaus, and his mother, Efratia Margalit, was a teacher. He finished the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1968.

He studied architecture at the Technion in Haifa. He later earned a PhD in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

During the 1973 Yom Kippur War he left his studies for reserve duty in a helicopter rescue unit. He filmed the war with a Super 8 camera and was wounded when a Syrian missile hit his helicopter. After the war he chose to make films.

His first full-length film, House, from 1980, was about a house in West Jerusalem and was censored by Israeli television. After the controversy over Field Diary from 1982, he lived in France from 1983 to 1993. He organized much of his work in trilogies, and his film Yom Kippur appeared in 2000.

He has made over 90 works, including films, installations and theater. In 2018 he was elected professor at the Collège de France. Italy made him a Grand Officer of the Order of the Star of Italy in 2019.