House

Multilingual ensemble
Actors and musicians with roots in the Middle East, Iran and France perform together on stage. Music is heard from a variety of cultural traditions along with numerous different languages: Arabic, Yiddish, French, Hebrew, English, Armenian and Turkish. Through the composition of its multilingual ensemble, “House” attempts to establish a dialogue that presents Israeli and Palestinian narratives side by side on equal terms. With the restrained gesture of an attentive observer, Amos Gitai juxtaposes contrasting memories and perceptions: relief at the establishment of a Jewish state as a promise of security and despair at the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland both have their place. 

The filmmaker as archaeologist
The trained architect Amos Gitai (born in Haifa in 1950) made his first film experiments with a Super 8 camera during his deployment in the Yom Kippur War (1973), where he survived a Syrian missile attack on the evacuation helicopter he was sitting in. The first part of the “House” trilogy (Bait, 1980) was commissioned by Israeli television, but was censored and not broadcast. He then moved to Paris to continue his cinematic work. He later returned to this house and the people associated with it, and shot two further episodes. The internationally renowned and award-winning director now lives in Paris and Israel and has created over 90 documentaries and feature films. In recent years, Amos Gitai has also worked as a theatre director, at venues including the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, USA, the Coronet Theater in London, the Odéon - Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris and the Burgtheater in Vienna. In many of his works, Gitai examines the contradictions of his Israeli homeland. Here he compares his working practice to that of an archaeologist, painstakingly unearthing one layer after another in order to discover the complexities that underlie the present.