House + Letter To A Friend In Gaza

In his first longer documentary, Amos Gitai already perfected many elements that make up his artistic handwriting: the fearless exploration of the relations between Israel and the Arab world, the persistence with which he unearths inconvenient truths, and the interweaving of the political and the personal. House, the first installment of a subsequent trilogy, looks at the inner workings of a building that was abandoned during the war by its Palestinian tenants in 1948. Confiscated by the Israeli government, it was rented out in 1956 to Jewish immigrants from Algeria and is now owned by a university professor who wants to turn it into a villa. The documentary was censored by Israeli television but celebrated at festivals in Berlin and Rotterdam.
Following this documentary will be a special screening of the movie Letter to a Friend in Gaza, a conceptual piece of filmic protest poetry, in which Gitai—with some recourse to Albert Camus, Yizhar Smilansky, Emile Habibi, Mahmoud Darwish, and Amira Hass—ponders the situation in Gaza. (jm/dhe)

© A Letter to a Friend in Gaza (Amos Gitai)