Amos Gitai
Amos Gitai (born 1950) is an Israeli filmmaker whose prolific body of work moves between documentary, fiction, and the boundary in between, often centred on Israeli history, politics, and identity. Born in Haifa to a Bauhaus architect, he trained as an architect himself, earning degrees from the Technion and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. As a young reservist he was shot down in a helicopter during the 1973 Yom Kippur War — a defining trauma that led him to abandon architecture for film, where he began with the 1980 documentary House. His Cities trilogy — Devarim, Yom Yom, and Kadosh — and Kippur (2000), Israel's first major cinematic reckoning with the 1973 war, established his international reputation. He has received the Robert Bresson Prize, the Roberto Rossellini Prize, and a Pardo d'Onore at Locarno for his body of work.