Director Amos Gitai: “It’s time to work for peace”

Amos Gitai will present his latest film today at the Berlinale. In this exclusive interview for Italy the great Israeli director tells us why Shikun is inspired by Rinoceros by Ionesco, because he shot it in one council house in the middle of the desert before October 7th and why he didn’t regret letting him out after the Hamas massacre.

The title, Shikunmeans “public housing” in Hebrew; the building metaphor is reminiscent of one of his previous films, Bait. Once again, she seems to address the themes of exile and belonging through the metaphor of home.

“I chose between two options, and the second was It’s Not Over Yet, based on the song heard in the film. My friends in Tel Aviv prefer the latter, which will also be the title of the film in Israel, but I prefer it Shikun, which in Hebrew means “public housing”, a building in which to live. The word comes from a verb that means “to repair”, “to give refuge”. And the film gives refuge to people who, for different reasons, need to escape the threat of rhinos. I like the sound of the word, I know most people won’t know what it means, but that doesn’t bother me, quite the opposite. It’s something abstract that I like, which is in the spirit of the project.”

In the film, inspired by a famous play by Ionesco, The Rhinos, the actors move in a narrow gallery which however on one side is open to the world. The contrast between a limited space and a plurality of cultures that move in that gallery seems to suggest that Israel is a realized utopia. Or that it could be.

“Inspired precisely by Ionesco, the film tells the story of the emergence of intolerance and totalitarian thought through a series of daily episodes that take place in Israel in a single building, the Shikun. In this group of people of different origins and languages, some they transform into rhinos, and others resist. An ironic metaphor for life in our contemporary societies. The Shikun where I shot the film is a famous example of public housing: it is said to be the longest in the Middle East, measuring over 250 metres. It is located in the city of Beer-Sheva, in the center of the Negev desert, in southern Israel.The building itself is a powerful architectural gesture, in the spirit of Le Corbusier, a sort of coup de force, a manifesto in the middle of the desert Its spatial organization, perspectives, angles and building materials help me bring these different characters and activities to life in a contiguous way. They can conflict or simply ignore each other, without having to create artificial sequences, series of causes and effects, as too many films try to do. The film is about the chaos of the world, the chaos created by war, economic inequality and injustice. In my films I often explore a microcosm with the ambition that it reflects a more general truth. In the same way that a cell can provide a representation and contain information about an entire living body. This unity of place, and also of time, implies some rather radical formal choices, which organize the flow of the movement and make visible the forces that concentrate and oppose each other.”

In 1999 you made one of the first films on the opposite of this complexity: Kudos it’s a pretty strong look at an ultra-Orthodox wedding. And the protagonists are crushed by religious rigor.

“I come from a family that on my mother’s side arrived very early, in 1905, to build Israel as a modern, non-religious state. Indeed, anti-religious. They were socialists. My maternal grandparents were fleeing from Russia, because of the pogrom. At the time that foundation was a secular and modern gesture. The meaning was to find a home after hundreds of years of pogroms and persecution. My work is often inspired by two things: either I am very moved or I am upset. At that time I was very disturbed by the large demonstrations of Orthodox people who said that Israel should be governed by the laws of the Torah. So I told myself that I would make a film that shows what it means to live under the strict laws of the most Orthodox Torah. And what it means to be considered inferior, for a woman. In the morning prayers of the ultra-Orthodox they say ‘thank you God that you did not make me a woman’. ‘Thank God instead I am the son of a feminist mother’.

There is an impressive sequence in which Irene Jacob slowly tears off her clothes: she doesn’t want to become a ‘rhino’. Ionesco said that his work “is against collective hysteria and epidemics that hide behind reason and ideas”. It is a work against totalitarianism.

“In the month before the October 7 war, Israel was in turmoil. We were in the midst of a huge protest movement against Netanyahu and his far-right government’s attempt to reform the legal system. The huge demonstrations included feminists, soldiers, academics , economists, activists for peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis and a large part of civil society: all against the destruction of the rule of law. This movement was also a reaction to the rise of a form of conformism and the disappearance of the spirit critical, in Israeli society. It is in this context that I reread the play The Rhinos by Ionesco, written at the end of the 1950s as an anti-totalitarian fable: it seemed to me to echo what we were experiencing. I saw in it the possibility of inspiring a film about the present we were living in.”

I read that you wondered, after the October 7 massacre, whether the film was still relevant. But a reflection on the dangers of radicalization seems even more burning, after 4 months of war. And in view of a very difficult election year in Europe, where right-wing parties are growing or are already in government, as in Italy.

“After October 7th and what followed, I hesitated, I asked myself what to do, I thought about not releasing the film, or about modifying it. In the end I decided to show it exactly as it is. It seems to me that the film is coherent and that what remains relevant even in today’s context. Perhaps, given the proliferation of rhinos, it offers an even more current approach. Reality is the result of heterogeneous forces, randomness and illogical interference. And in the midst of all this, there is an active force: fear. Fear is not a fact, it is constructed, it is manufactured, and leaders like Trump, Netanyahu, Orban, Putin, etc. they are fear engineers, and obviously so is Hamas. They thrive on the feeling of fear they produce and maintain. This is what rhinos represent metaphorically, and this is what we must oppose.”

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Is peace still possible in Israel?

“In 1994, during a trip, I asked Yitzak Rabin about Gaza. He replied: ‘I am against the unilateral withdrawal of Israel. If we leave, 26,000 Palestinian officials will not receive their salaries. I want them to have water, electricity, oxygen in the hospital “. Peace is not unilateral. What we should learn from the experience of the Germans who carried out genocide against the Jews and massacred millions of people in World War II is what happened after World War I. The Germans were humiliated and crushed with the Treaty of Versailles which destroyed their economy. And what we got was Hitler. After the Second World War the conclusion was the opposite: Germany fell and the Allies helped rebuild it. Now in Israel the killing time has already been long enough. Now we must find a solution to live in peace with the Palestinians.”