Cities, territories, and borders are protagonists as well as locales in the award-winning cinema of Amos Gitai. In this lecture, Gitai reveals how his training as an architect informs his use of space to propel narratives of war, politics, religion, and human relations. Exploring examples from his extensive oeuvre, he considers how his work—much of it focused on Israeli-Palestinian conflicts since 1948—uses specific filmic techniques and pacing to convey the fabric and meaning of everyday life in zones of intense conflict over land, religion, and history.

Gitai’s work has been presented in major retrospectives at the Pompidou Center, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Lincoln Center, New York; and British Film Institute, London. Between 1989 and 2015 ten of his films were entered in competition at the Cannes and Venice film festivals. Gitai’s films have received several prestigious prizes, including the Leopard of Honor at the Locarno International Film Festival (2008), the Roberto Rossellini prize (2005), the Robert Bresson prize (2013), and the Paradjanov prize (2014). He has been distinguished as Officier des arts et lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2015, and was named the Chevalier de L’ordre National de la Légion d'honneur in 2017. Gitai received a PhD in architecture from UC Berkeley in 1979. He resides in Haifa and Paris.